How do you get urgent help in a crowd?

Reading National Geographic once, I came across a psychological effect called the bystander effect.

The bystander effect is a social psychology theory holding that individuals are less likely to help someone in trouble when other people are present.

The larger the crowd of bystanders, the less likely any one of them is to think that they should be the one to step in — because they assume someone else will do it in their place, or because they do not want to draw attention to themselves, or because they do not want the responsibility that would come with it.

Let me tell you about something that happened long before I knew this phenomenon had a name.

One afternoon about two years ago, on my way from our alley out to the main road, I saw a man on a motorbike weaving as if he were drunk (or on something). I kept riding slowly behind him, and as we came up to the crossroads, at the red light he slumped almost all the way over to the left. I rode up and asked whether he was all right, whether he wanted me to call his family or an ambulance for him. I could see that his eyes had glazed over, and a few seconds later he collapsed for certain. When the light changed people began peeling off in every direction, and I was so flustered that I had no idea what to do, because there was no way I could lift him on my own. Just then, luckily, a very “sturdy” young man and woman came past on one motorbike, and I singled one of them out and called to him: please, could you help me move him to the side of the road — I don’t know what is wrong with him, I am not a relative of his. So the two of them stopped, he picked the man up and carried him right over to the side of the road, and she wheeled our motorbikes over for us and even fetched him some water to drink. I asked him to check whether the man had a phone on him, but there was none to be found anywhere. An older man at the roadside said it looked as though he had had an epileptic seizure, that we should let him sit and rest a while and he would be fine, that we should all go on our way, and that if anything went wrong he would call an ambulance for him.

The two of them and I were all in a hurry, so everyone left him sitting there to rest. I do not know how he was afterwards. I only hope nothing bad happened to him.

I will save a few more stories about this effect for a later post.