'Yue Yue' video is gruesome, but we're all prone to bystander effect

LAST SATURDAY a middle-aged woman hurriedly crossed Nassau Street in Dublin, maybe rushing to catch one of the buses lined up along the south wall of Trinity College. I saw her out of the corner of my eye as she hit the ground hard. Even from a good distance away, and on the other side of the street, her fall caught my attention, like an object falling to earth rather than a person losing balance.

Her face seemed to take a lot of the impact, and she briefly lay in the path of traffic and buses, inanimate. But a moment later she was surrounded by at least seven or eight passers-by, who helped her to her feet, picked up her belongings and wiped her face with a tissue.

It was exactly how you think a group of people would respond in such a situation: with concern and kindness. In China, however, the issue of how people react when somebody needs help is convulsing the nation after the horrific case of Wang Yue, the two-year-old girl knocked down by a minivan in Foshan, in southern China, earlier this month.

As the Irish Times correspondent Clifford Coonan described it, “Street-monitoring footage from a market street shows 18 pedestrians and cyclists passing two-year-old Wang Yue, nicknamed ‘Yue Yue’, as she lay bleeding to death on the pavement after being hit by two vans. None of the 18 stopped to help. The 19th pedestrian, a migrant worker collecting rubbish, pulled her to the side of the street and alerted the girl’s mother.”

Yue Yue’s death was followed this week by another fatal road accident in which a five-year-old boy was knocked down by a cement truck in Sichuan province, forcing the nation of 1.3 billion people to question whether they are facing a grand moral crisis and whether the rush towards capitalist growth has corroded their capacity for empathy.

The Yue Yue video is gut-wrenching and gruesome, a graphic illustration of the harrowing power of indifference. It is so profoundly affecting that it demands interpretation: to deal with the horrific behaviour it depicts we transform it into metaphor for a lack of Chinese empathy or social decay. It’s the only way to impose meaning on something that seems so incomprehensible.

But while there might be some basis for concern about changing social mores in China, extrapolating huge conclusions about a place based on isolated incidents is, simply, bad science. For a start, appalling incidents of indifference to the suffering of others aren’t restricted to modern China. The most notorious case was the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, in March 1964. A New York Times report on her murder began: “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”

Just as the Yue Yue video is being seen as a metaphor for Chinese moral decline, the Genovese case was cast as an illustration of the brutalising effect of urban life, where corrosive isolation leads to a chronic lack of empathy. Others even saw it as evidence of television’s harmful pacifying effect. For a nation still reeling from the Kennedy assassination, the Genovese case was confirmation that society itself was ill. The murder led to all sorts of psychological research in this area, leading to the theory of diffusion of responsibility, where people in large groups don’t take responsibility for a situation as they would do if they were alone, and the related bystander effect.

But that was then, we might think: surely the United States has changed? In April last year a homeless Guatemalan immigrant, Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, was stabbed and killed in Queens while saving a woman from a knife-wielding attacker. He lay dying on the path for more than an hour as dozens of people walked by, none stopping to help. One man even took a picture of Tale-Yax on his mobile. The bystander effect is very real.

But what about the incident on Nassau Street? People leaped to help the woman who fell: should we see this as proof that the bystander effect is flawed or that we are the most caring nation on the planet? It’s not a bad sign, sure, but imagine if, every time we walked by someone passed out on the footpath, it was filmed and edited into a reel of our indifference: we would be deeply ashamed of our collective callousness and realise that, yes, we are all prone to the bystander effect.

Believing that what happened to Yue Yue and Kitty Genovese and Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was down to a moment of moral or national crisis is the ultimate diffusion of responsibility.

Shane Hegarty is on leave