Back in 1964 a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death near her home in Queens. Reportedly, that murder was "witnessed" (not necessarily seen but heard) by dozens of people and none of them called for help or reported the crime. The entire attack, during which Genovese was raped and repeatedly stabbed, took about half an hour. It wasn't until then that a neighbor finally came to see what was going on, only to find Genovese dying and her attacker gone.
Although it turned out that the neglect of the people that "witnessed" the crime wasn't as bad as it was reported to be (for instance, neighbors heard the disturbance but thought it was only a lovers' quarrel or something so never went to see what was happening), the bystander effect (which is a very real thing where people do nothing because they are waiting for someone else to do something) has come to be known as Genovese Syndrome.
It all has to do with "diffusion of responsibility," which is to say that the more people who are present, the less likely any one specific one of them will do anything as far as standing up for someone else. It's the same kind of behavior that possible made what the SS did in Germany leading up to and during WWII: People are disappearing but no one is going to say anything because, hey, at least it wasn't me. Right? Someone else can do something about it. Not me.
It was the New York case that really prompted the psychological study of this social condition, and it has been repeatedly shown in tests that the likelihood of someone to offer help of any kind to someone is in inverse proportion to the number of people present. For instance, one of the studies dealt with a woman falling down and being "hurt." When there was only one person present, that person would offer assistance to the woman about 70% of the time. [70%! What the freaking heck! That means that 30% would just walk past! Wait... this sounds like a familiar story.] As more people were involved to witness the woman fall, the less likely it was that anyone would offer help, so, with two people, someone offered help only 40% of the time.
To me, this is insane behavior, and it gets worse the more complicated the situation is, like if someone is being aggressive or attacking someone else. Also, it is this same root phenomenon, just reversed, that leads to mob behavior.
To make things even more interesting (or baffling about how humans have managed to survive for so long), there were some recent studies done on how this phenomenon affects online behavior. In the studies, two people were planted in chat room situations: one to bully and one to be bullied. In these simulations, only 10% of the other people in the chat rooms would come to the defense of the person being bullied. 10%! Let me put that another way: During these simulations where one person would bully and verbally abuse another person, 90% of the participants would act as if nothing was going on. 90%!
These were basically anonymous environments where there could be no actual repercussions from the abusive person, and only one person in ten would do the right thing. After all of the media coverage of online bullying and teenagers committing suicide over it, this is amazing to me. Not in a good way.
I get it. People pretty much suck, but this takes the suckitude of people to a whole new level. I don't know; maybe, science is wrong. Maybe we didn't survive as a species because of our ability to work together. Maybe we survived by always throwing the other person under the bus. Um, I mean the tiger. Or the bear. Or whatever. Or, maybe, we've just gotten worse over time because of our tendency to breed assholes. I suppose the past doesn't matter that much in that respect. What I do know, though, is that if we don't start, as a species, looking out for the other guy, globally, pretty soon, there won't be any of us left. Globally.