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The mob mentality

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

By Zafar Syed

The Bystander Effect: An attempt to understand the social psychology of the mob

The brutal murder of two teenage brothers in Sialkot has sent shudders of fear and loathing across the spine of the society. People are asking probing questions about our values and morals as a nation. Some have even felt shame to be a Pakistani due to the incident. More than the murder itself, the outrage has been directed towards the behavior of the onlookers and their apathy is being condemned by all parts of the society. The onlookers included cameramen who shot the event in all its bloody details to haunt the conscience of the entire
nation.

But before publicly lynching the insensitive crowd itself for their appalling passivity, one needs to answer some important questions. How much the bystanders are to be blamed and are they really the scum on the face of the earth that we think they are?

There is a somewhat parallel incident in American crime history. In March 13, 1964, a twenty-eight years old woman Kitty Genovese was assaulted and stabbed multiple times to death outside an apartment building in Queens, New York.

Although violent crime is nothing new in New York and this too would have buried in police files, safely away from public conscience, except for one detail. According to newspaper reports, while Kitty Genovese was being murdered, thirty eight people from her neighborhood watched for thirty five minutes and much less coming down to intervene, nobody even cared to pick up the phone and call the cops. A reporter of the New York Times tried to explain their behavior:
Nobody can say why the thirty-eight did not lift the phone while Miss Genovese was being attacked, since they cannot say themselves …
Indifference to one’s neighbors and his troubles is a conditioned reflex in life in New York as it is in other big cities.

A housewife had this to say to the reporter: I didn’t want my husband to get involved.

Another man said: I was tired. I went to bed early.

This article in the Times proved a dynamite which caused seismic ripples across the United States. The public fury knew no bounds. Politicians, religious scholars and public figures decried it as a new low in human civilization. Books were written, TV dramas and comic books featured the ignominious event, and even songs were composed. One poignant song carries of theme of public indifference
further:
Look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain But Monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game. And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the event President Clinton went to New York and said: It sent a chilling message about what had happened at that time in a society, suggesting that we were each of us not simple in danger but fundamentally alone.

This “fundamental loneliness” got social scientists salivating. It has been said that more academic research on “bystander effect” – as this event subsequently came to be known – has been done than even the socio-psychology of the almighty Holocaust. Researchers have conducted numerous experiments to understand the effect. And the findings were nothing less than astounding: The more people witnessing a tragedy, the less is the chance of anybody coming forward to help the victim.

For example, the researcher asked as student to stage an epileptic fit in front of others. When there was just one person present in the vicinity, 85 percent of the time he/she would come forward to help. But when there were four persons present, they came to help only 31 percent of time. The researchers argued that being in company of people diffuses the responsibility and everybody thinks that the others should act first. What is more, a group in such situations tends to blame other members of the group: if they are not acting, why should I?

This reminds me of another example of the diffusion of responsibility. During one of the power outages in Islamabad five or six years ago, I thought time many people from the sector would be calling to register the complaint with the WAPDA office, so I stayed put. But the problem was that I had to finish an urgent project on my computer, so after an hour of waiting in the dark, I became impatient and called, hoping that the lines would be jammed. I got connected on the first try. “What outage, which area are you calling from?” was the response
of the person from the complaint office. I was stunned. Nobody had called the, thinking others might have done so.

So, according to researchers, it’s not that nobody intervened on that night in Queens despite thirty-eight people watching; it’s because thirty-eight people were watching that nobody intervened.

This is exactly what happened in Sialkot as well when a horde of people witnessed the horrific public lynching of Mughees and Mubeen. There were so many people present at the scene that everybody thought the others should burden the civic responsibility and, in the end, nobody came forward to stop the brutality.

There is a further mitigating factor in the behavior of these people. Several police officers were also present at the crime scene. This squarely put the ball in the court of the police. The people would have thought that since the “law-enforcers” were there, who were they to hold the hands of the slaughterers.

There is a Tradition from the Prophet Muhammad which goes something like this. The best degree of the Faith is to try to stop injustice by force, followed by trying to speak the perpetrators out of it, and third and the lowest degree is to at least condemn the wrongdoing silently.

We know that the voyeuristic throng of Sialkot does not pass the first and the second grades of the Iman, but at least they documented the event and presented the recordings to the media, which suggests that they were indeed concerned about it. One cameraman clearly kept on filming despite threats from the police. Without their efforts, the society would never have known the true nature of the incident. The point is that these things can happen anywhere, anytime and there is no need to feel ashamed of being a Pakistani and jump in the first boat out of the country because of it.

As to why didn’t the police intervene, that’s another story for another time. One thing is certain, though: They cannot plead the Diffusion of Responsibility in their defense.


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