there’s this myth about why people don’t call for help if something bad happens in a crowded place

(assumption that someone else already called for help so you don’t need to)

And this is one of those really insidious thoughts, because…. it is easy to believe this, if you ARE the kind of person who WOULD see something bad happen in a crowd and assume that one of the many other people there must have already dealt with it.

There certainly are people who have this reaction. It’s a real reaction. It exists.

It just…. is NOT a reaction SO UNIVERSAL that you are likely to encounter a huge crowd where EVERYONE is currently having that same reaction.

and this is very, very clear if you have ever worked with huge crowds of people.

Like in retail, or any kind of customer service.

because most of the time, if there is a thing that looks wrong, in a place frequented by large numbers of people –

even if this wrong-looking thing is actually totally under control– no matter HOW CLEARLY you have pointed this out in writing– no matter how obvious you have tried to make it, that the necessary authorities ALREADY KNOW about the problem and nothing more needs to be done about it right now–

PEOPLE WILL STILL POINT IT OUT.

AGAIN. AND AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

Probably not most people! I would estimate that in most cases, most people actually ARE thinking “whoever’s problem this is, they’re clearly on top of it already.”

But in a CROWD, “most people” means jack shit, because 1% of people could still be hundreds.

And yeah, there still are times when something really bad happens in a crowd and nobody does anything about it! But in those cases (including the well-known one that popularized belief in this phenomenon) there tend to be other factors at play.

For example: some people are wishful thinking and convincing themselves that nothing’s actually wrong. And some are pretty sure something is wrong but don’t actually care about the people who are being hurt by it.

And some of them do care and might even want to call for help, but are afraid that there’s no one to call for help who wouldn’t just make things worse.

(which is often true, especially if the “help” would be the police)

(And even people who aren’t really anti-cop are often afraid of calling the cops if they aren’t 1000% certain that it’s a real emergency.)

Basically: people are complicated, people are different, there are not many blanket statements that apply to them all– and when a fuckin huge crowd of people do something, they usually have a fuckin huge crowd of reasons for it.