Đề thi thử tốt nghiệp THPT 2027 môn Tiếng Anh — Đề ôn luyện số 18

For over half a century, psychology students have learned a discouraging lesson: the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help. This idea, known as the bystander effect, is repeated so often in textbooks and the media that it is treated as established fact. Yet newer research suggests that the reality is more complicated, and more hopeful, than the classic account implies.

The effect was first demonstrated in laboratory experiments in the 1960s. In one well-known study, participants alone in a room were far more likely to report smoke pouring through a vent than those sitting with people secretly told to ignore it. Researchers offered two explanations. The first, diffusion of responsibility, holds that when many people are present, each feels less personally obliged to act. The second is that we look to others to judge whether a situation is serious, so a room full of calm faces can convince everyone that nothing is wrong.

Laboratory settings, however, differ from real life. Critics point out that participants in such experiments were usually strangers to one another, faced situations that were unclear, and often had little reason to believe that their help was genuinely needed. Outside the laboratory, one research team analysed over two hundred real public conflicts recorded by security cameras in three countries. In about nine out of ten incidents, at least one bystander, and usually several, stepped in, whether by calming those involved, pulling them apart or comforting the victim. Moreover, the chance that someone would intervene rose, rather than fell, as the number of bystanders grew.

How can these results be reconciled with the classic studies? One answer is that they measure different things. The classic studies measured the chance that a particular person will help, which may indeed fall slightly when responsibility is shared. In a real emergency, however, what matters to the victim is not whether any given bystander acts but whether anyone does. A large crowd in which each person is a little less likely to act can still contain more helpers than a small one.

None of this means the classic findings were simply wrong. Diffusion of responsibility is real, and an emergency that seems ambiguous may still be ignored. But the newer evidence challenges the gloomy conclusion that crowds make people indifferent, suggesting that we are more willing to help strangers than we assume.