In October 2011, a two-year-old girl, Wang Yue, was hit by a small, white van in the city of Foshan, China, then run over by a large truck when she was not moved by bystanders. A total of 18 people ignored her, some going so far as to walk around the blood. The girl was left for 7 minutes before a recycler, Chen Xianmei, picked up the toddler and called for help. The child died eight days later.
This is just one of several stories that exemplify what is called bystander empathy. Some use it to depict the world of today as one which totally lacks compassion. The apathy that people have toward their fellow man is astoundingly low, resulting in a sick cruel world that we see in examples such as this. But is that how we should really interpret such events?
Here’s the thing. This story and other examples of bystander apathy make such great shock and awe stories because it isn’t what we expect in the real world. I don’t mean the real world like the ideal world in our heads kind of way. I mean the real world like everything we observe in our daily life kind of way. Bystander apathy completely contradicts what we realistically expect from other human beings. The story of Wang Yue is bizarre. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it is so spectacular because it is the outlier to the typical rule that people generally are compassionate. That’s why it is called a psychological phenomenon.
If the bystander apathy really represented the world in general then it wouldn’t be news.
This means that we should not be using such stories to prove the point that the world is without compassion.
