You're Part of the Problem

Understanding Bystander Apathy and How We’re Complicit in Wrongdoing

I love a good boundary; I genuinely can’t get enough, but there’s been an unwanted habit a lot of us have developed that doesn’t feel like a problem till you really think about it: If something needs to be done, we leave someone else to do it. We sort of distance ourselves from responsibility and spin stories to validate our inaction. Let’s talk.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) is often used to preach about how we should love our neighbours as ourselves, and rightly so. I actually heard an excellent sermon on it not long ago about how some people may have the compassion but not the means to offer such practical love.

The parable goes something like this:

A Jewish man was attacked and left dying on the side of the road. Two men of faith offered him no assistance, but someone who should have been his enemy at the time showed him compassion and paid for him to be taken care of. (Please read Luke 10:25-37 for additional context and the full parable).

A part of this parable is often ignored or misrepresented, and I believe we’re seeing parallels in society today and throughout history. The two men of faith - one of them a priest even - looked at the wounded man and walked right on by.

We’re given zero context as to their motivations (or lack of) but they’re often portrayed as less than the Good Samaritan, understandably so. While we’re encouraged to be like the Good Samaritan, we’re not taught how to not be like the men of faith who ignored the man.

I’d like us to sit with a thought for a minute.

What if the reason they walked by wasn’t that they didn’t have compassion for the man, didn’t have the means or were cruel, but simply because they didn’t see it as their personal responsibility? What if they quietly assumed someone else would stop and help?

Again, this is just a thought I’d like you to sit with because we see it today in different flavours. There’s an ongoing cost-of-living crisis that most of us disengage from because we are coping. Or workplace injustice that we may privately agree is wrong, but we don’t challenge publicly.

How about we bring it closer home: seeing people needing the most basic assistance - struggling with heavy bags, needing help carrying a buggy up/downstairs, the elderly/pregnant standing on public transport - somehow we default to “they’ll ask if they need help” or “someone else will do it”.

There’s a term for this behaviour, Bystander Apathy.

In a nutshell, it’s the tendency for us to withhold assistance when other people are around. Not out of cruelty, but simply because we’re quietly assuming someone else would step up. The flipside is that if no one steps up, we conclude it wasn’t that big of a deal in the first place.

There are a number of reasons why this phenomenon exists but for the purpose of this newsletter - Living with Intention - I want to call out the lack of personal responsibility as it bleeds into areas of our lives we might not have thought of.

Diffusion of Responsibility

This is the belief that in situations where assistance is required, someone else is already handling it, is better placed to handle it, or quite simply, someone else will handle it. Subconsciously, we distribute responsibility according to the number of people present.

Collective Responsibility isn’t a radical concept. It’s the very foundation that a functional community is built on. Despite how it feels and what society tries to tell us, we are built to be interdependent. When we ignore our personal responsibility to the collective, we actively contribute to the breakdown of community.

Personal responsibility doesn’t vanish within the collective, because the crowd is large or because “someone else can do it”. We always carry personal responsibility with us. If we all had the mindset that someone else will do it, nothing would get done and the status quo will remain unchanged.

The thing is, it’s typically not a conscious decision. (I’d like to believe) No one says to themselves, “I won’t do anything because someone else will do it” or “Not my problem”. It’s not a choice to be cruel or villainous. I reckon it’s more likely we reassure ourselves that our personal responsibility isn’t required.

When the burden of action feels shared, weirdly we lean more towards inaction as it gets carried by nobody. Collective inaction because we’re all looking towards someone else ignoring that we are the someone else to others . A loop of collective inaction rather than responsibility.

It’s funny because we see it get played out when a speaker asks the audience members for volunteers. Rarely is there a rush of people to volunteer (unless there’s an associated tangible or intangible reward such as being noticed by the speaker, or maybe a freebie).

But once one person volunteers, then others follow in kind. The first person followed through on their believed personal responsibility, and others recognised theirs. We instinctively look outward to calibrate our own behaviour.

Another way we see it get played out is when a group is asked for feedback. We may not feel inclined to say anything even though we’re collectively unhappy, but once the first person speaks up, it’s almost like the floodgates open.

Consequences of Bystander Apathy

Circling back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, it’s easy to think of the consequences in terms of emergency situations e.g. someone collapses, no one calls an ambulance, or we witness racism or abusive behaviour and we just stare or pretend like we can’t see it.

I reckon the consequences are deeper, wider and may not be immediately obvious, but accumulate to cause real damage. I could think of quite a few but I’ve picked out four that I believe are easily recognised:

Community

I referenced community earlier. A signal of a healthy community is when everyone participates and plays their part. It’s easy to believe that community is based on proximity to each other, but what’s the point of being in close proximity if we’re all waiting for someone else to take action?

If we collectively stop looking out for each other, we’re no longer “taking care of our own”. Over time, it simply becomes a group of individuals coexisting. We’re present, but unengaged. It’s not malicious, but we’re actively contributing to the deterioration of the community.

Inaction Becomes the Norm

On one hand, there’s a line of thinking that posits that we’ve been desensitised to the atrocities happening all over the world and on our doorsteps due to volume and over exposure, so we’re less inclined to join social movements and would rather “protect” our peace by ignoring them.

I’d like to propose that, in parallel with this, we’ve simply grown used to not responding to or participating in social movements because someone else will do it. The more visible movements are, the easier it is to assume our individual voices aren’t needed.

Toxic Cultures Form

Toxic cultures rarely start as toxic, curated overnight by a villain. They typically start with small moments where something wrong happens but goes unquestioned or unchallenged. These aggregate over time to define what is acceptable in the organisation. Work, church, charity, any organisation.

Any unchallenged behaviour - public humiliation, undermining others, favouritism/bias - becomes a precedent and ironically, lowers the threshold for the next one. Individually, they seem like they’re not that big a deal. Collectively, they become the culture.

Decline of Moral Courage

Repeated action or inaction rewrites how we see and understand ourselves. Courage isn’t a personality trait; no one is born courageous or cowardly. I tackled this previously: To Be Courageous Like Joshua. Some of us appear more courageous because we have behaved that way over time and reinforced the belief.

When we consistently fail to act, we gradually stop believing we’re capable. Every time we act courageously, we reinforce the self-narrative that we’re courageous. Conversely, every time we don’t, we reinforce the self-narrative in the other direction. Speaking up and stepping in will feel harder and riskier.

Final Thoughts

At some point the conversation around the teaching of the Good Samaritan should force us to self-reflect on whether we have actually been the good Samaritan or whether we’ve been the people of faith who walked on by without taking action.

It’s easy to do the right thing in theory but what have our actions so far taught us about ourselves? Collective responsibility isn’t about what other people should do, it’s the sum total of all of us making individual decisions to take personal responsibility.

Every time we wait for someone else to do the right thing, it speaks volumes of who we are and of our character. The truth is that it reveals that we’re outsourcing our values. It’s the very antithesis of what it means to live with intention.

Being the first to speak up or step in may feel expensive, and leave us feeling exposed or awkward. People might even look at us and say we’re “doing too much”. But the cost of no one taking action can be disastrous and we’re seeing this in society today.

I believe there comes a point in time where we have to decide the type of person we want to be and be intentional about being that person. I submit to you that taking personal responsibility may be the highest form of self-respect. Remember, doing nothing when you can do something is also a choice.

As always, make a decision that future you will be grateful for.

Have a great week!

CT