"Bad things happen when good people pretend nothing is wrong!" - Corey Taylor
About a month ago while I was walking along the boardwalk/docks of Halifax harbor a man handed me a small paper. The words on the front were "How good are you?"
Of course this was one of those things handed out by people of various religious groups often written off as "extremists" in their views.
I happily took it and thanked him as they were very polite and nice and simply trying to share some information they obviously thought was important.
I tossed the paper in my purse and didn't think much of it until the other day when I was cleaning things out of my bag and there it was.
This time around I took the time to glance through it and read some of the little captions.
Examples of simple daily actions, thoughts, responses and reactions that we often overlook as small or simple were highlighted.
It got me thinking - just how good am I?
How good are people in general these days?
I'm not talking about following the "laws" and being a model citizen when it comes to rules and regulations set out by government or varying levels of authority.
I'm talking about the moments in life that really matter.
The ones that truly define in some way how "good" we really are.
We see a lot of examples these days of people "paying it forward" by making small gestures like paying for the person behind them in the drive-thru, or giving a gift card to a stranger, buying a homeless person a meal or donating to charity, etc.
These are nice to see and can sometimes restore a little "faith in humanity" so to speak.
While all of these small things can be heart warming and certainly make a positive impact on someone else's day I had to wonder is this the most we are capable of?
Can we be just as "good" when it really matters? When it comes to the important moments in life?
A t.v. show called "What Would You Do?" often looks at what people would do in various situations. It tests people by creating situations that are often ones where those small acts of kindness can make the biggest differences. Actors carry out different scenarios and hidden camera's are set up to see just how people will react.
Instances that they create often mirror real life situations that involve abuse, racism, poverty, judgement and so much more!
You know all the things that can make us uncomfortable.
One thing that this show captures all too often is something called: The Bystander Effect.
The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation, against a bully, or during something serious like a crime. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is for any one of them to provide help to a person in distress. People are more likely to take action in a crisis when there are few or no other witnesses present.
Some places have even adopted Good Samaritan laws, making it criminal not to help a person in need unless it would put your own life in danger.
Good people can be complicit in bad behavior - hence the common phrase often used as an excuse “we were just following orders”.
Take the nurses and soldiers in Nazi Germany who willfully killed men, women and children.
People can't possibly fathom why these highly educated people would ever participate in these kinds of actions willingly.
The answer is: Propaganda—spreading of information that is intended to persuade an audience to accept a particular idea or cause, often by using biased material or by stirring up emotions. In this case negative emotions used in just the right way.
Germans were not forced to be killers. Those who refused to participate were given other assignments or transferred. To this day no one has found an example of a German who was executed for refusing to take part in the killing of Jews or other civilians although given the state of things at the time I'm sure there likely were.
Defense attorneys however, of people accused of war crimes have looked hard for such a case because it would support the claim that their clients had no choice. The Nazi system, however, did not work that way. There were enough willing perpetrators so that coercive force could be reserved for those deemed enemies.
People who speak up against things like bullying or take a stand when others won't are called “upstanders.”
These kinds of people have confidence in their judgement and values and believe their actions will make a positive difference. These were the enemies!
The few that thought outside the box and took action against wrong doings when they saw it.
Now it’s natural for people to freeze or go into shock when seeing someone having an emergency. This is usually a response of fear— fear that you are too weak or inexperienced enough to help, or that you might be misunderstanding what you are seeing and there is no actual danger, or even that helping will put your own life in danger.
Fear can make us do a lot of things we would normally see as wrong.
On Oct. 24, 2009, as many as 20 witnesses watched as a 15-year-old girl was brutally assaulted and raped outside a homecoming dance in Richmond, CA. The viciousness of the attack itself was shocking to say the least, but what was even more shocking was the fact that so many people witnessed the attack and yet did nothing to intervene or call police. One of the officers involved in the case was quoted as saying, "what makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it." Some of the bystanders reportedly even laughed about it and took photos of the assault with their cell phones. An similar incident took place in New Bedford, MA, in 1983 when several men raped a woman on a pool table in front of several witnesses in a bar. The 1988 film "The Accused" depicted that incident.
How could people just stand by and watch something this horrible happen to these young, innocent girls? Psychological research on the bystander effect suggests a cause—there were too many eyewitnesses present combined that with something called "Pluralistic ignorance" which describes a situation where a majority of group members privately believe one thing, but assume (incorrectly) that most others believe the opposite and you might just have it.
One of the first steps in anyone's decision to help another is the recognition that someone is actually in need of help. When we are in a situation and are not sure there is an emergency or not, we often look to others to see how they are reacting. We then assume others might know something that we don't, so we gauge their reactions before we decide how to best respond. If people are acting like its an emergency, then we will treat it like one and act accordingly. But if others around us are acting calm, then we often tend to fail to recognize the immediacy of the situation and therefore fail to intervene on time or at all. A good example is something like this: if you see a child splashing wildly in the water our first instinct is to look around and see how others are responding. If others appear shocked & are yelling for help, we conclude the child is drowning and we dive in to help. However, if people are ignoring the child or laughing, we might conclude that the child is just playing around. To prevent ourselves from looking foolish or stupid we might just continue watching and not dive in to help.
In one study, this phenomenon was attempted to be recreated in a lab.
For the study, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire and after a few minutes, smoke would start to pour into the room underneath a door.
Sometimes the participants would be only one in the room when this happened, and other times there would be other students completing questionnaires in the room as well.
In actuality, these other "students" were in on the test and were instructed to keep calm no matter what happened.
Researchers wanted to know would the participants notice the smoke and go get help or would they simply write it off as nothing concerning and continue working on their questionnaire. Results showed alarmingly that when the participant was alone, 75% of them left to report the smoke. But when there were two other people in the room who remained calm, only 10% left to get help.
10%!! Now that's scary!
In some cases, the smoke got so thick the participant could barely read the questionnaire in front of them BUT as long as the other bystanders remained calm, they did as well. Thus the conclusion was: When we are alone, we are more likely to assume an emergency and act accordingly. When there are other bystanders, we are likely to look to others for guidance and will often mistakenly conclude it is not an emergency and will fail to help or will follow in the wrong decisions instead of trusting ourselves and making GOOD choices. The moral of this story is if you find yourself in any situation resist the urge to look to others and go with your gut instinct instead. If you think there is even a small possibility that someone is in need, act on it. If something is wrong -speak out!
Worst case scenario, you will embarrass yourself for a few minutes, but at best, you could save a life or be a hero to someone in need.
Secondly, if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself a victim and are in need of help, make sure you make it clear to those around you that this is an emergency situation. Self-defense instructors even tell women that if they are being attacked they should yell out "fire" instead of "help".
The word "help" is used in many situations that are non-life-threatening so when we hear it, it does not automatically indicate that there is an emergency.
In fact in a lot of ways we've essentially "desensitized" ourselves to the word. How sad!
On the other hand, we only scream the word "fire" when there is an actual fire so by yelling "fire," you immediately make everyone around you aware that they are in an emergency situation or something serious is going on.
The more bystanders there are, the less responsible each individual feels too.
When you are the only one present, 100% of the responsibility for providing help rests on your shoulders.
But if there are five eyewitnesses, only 20% of the responsibility is yours. The responsibility becomes defused or dispersed more the more the other people there are. In many situations, people may assume that someone else will help or that someone else is better qualified to provide assistance. But if everyone assumes this, then no one will intervene.
Again, it's the same thing we saw in Germany and in many other examples of group mentality throughout history. The reasoning heard all too often is "we weren't the only ones doing it!", or "everyone was doing it so we just went along with it".
No one felt solely responsible for the actions that had taken place so it was easier to accept and join in.
So how can we use this knowledge?
First, if you find yourself in any situation where you think someone else needs help and you are with several fellow bystanders, realize that you and everyone present is each 100% responsible for helping the victim.
Second, if you find yourself in need of help, it is up to you to actively make one of your eyewitnesses feel personally responsible for your well-being. When we are in need of help and there is a crowd watching, we often plead for help to anyone that is listening, thinking that at least one person will step up to intervene. Self-defense instructors again advise that you instead pick one particular person in the crowd, look them straight in the eye, and tell that one person you need help. By pleading to a specific individual, you suddenly make that person feel completely responsible and this increases the odds that they will help. The same technique can be used if you are trying to get several others to help you assist a victim. Point to one person and tell them to go get help; point to another and tell them to call 911. Giving specific instructions to specific people counteracts the diffusion of responsibility process.
This past couple of months I've been incredibly disheartened to see just how mean and angry people have been to others. The pandemic has taken it's toll on people and their ability to lean towards "being good" to others.
Sadly science has also proven that we respond more to negative stimuli.
One early study, for instance, Ito and colleagues (1998) found that our brains respond more intensely to negative stimuli. The researchers presented photos to 33 participants and measured their brain’s electrical activity to study its responses.
Neutral images(an electrical outlet, a plate), Positive pictures (people enjoying a rollercoaster), and Negative images (a gun pointed at the camera, a mutilated face) were all used.
Results showed more Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs), or activity, when participants viewed negative, as opposed to positive images, leading the researchers to conclude that our evaluations are more strongly influenced by the former.
News Coverages these days focus Predominantly on the Negative in nature as well.
Around the world, negative news articles appear to dominate the media, but why are they so prevalent? One hypothesis is that, due to negativity bias, negative coverage is more attention-grabbing than positive coverage.
A study by Soroka and colleagues (2019) looked into whether demand for negative information is a cross-national phenomenon. Looking at people’s psychophysiological reactions to video news content in 17 countries, their results revealed that globally, humans are more attentive to negative news on average and focus more intently on it.
Turns out we can't help ourselves but be drawn into the negativity!
It can reel us in, influences our decisions and can more intensely change how we see and react to certain situations.
We Even Think About Negative Events More
Have you ever been hung up on something terrible which happened earlier in the week, despite everything else going great? Our tendency to think more about negative events is another example of this bias in action. A 2009 paper by Larsen reviews ample evidence to suggest that negative emotions last longer than positive ones, that we tend to spend more time thinking about negative events, and that we often reason about them more.
This is likely related to learning and memory processes – the more attention we give to a stimulus or experience – the higher the likelihood that we’ll commit it to memory (Ohira et al., 1998).
So How do we Overcome the Bias?
As we’ve seen, negativity bias depends greatly on where we direct our attention. Directing more of our attention towards positive events and feelings we experience can help us begin to address the asymmetry of negativity bias.
And that requires practice. So, where do we start?
Cognitive Restructuring is something we can start to work on for ourselves.
Negativity biases have been linked to numerous psychological disorders, such as depression and anxiety (Riskind, 1997). When you catch yourself taking a negative view of situations, it often helps to practice cognitive restructuring by reframing the event or experience.
Savor the Positive Moments! Gratitude helps us in so many ways - hence the use of gratitude journals and implementing the use of such things as a way to counter things like depression, anxiety and to help maintain positive focus on things we want to accomplish.
Building up your store of positive mental images and feelings helps you improve the imbalance that negativity bias predisposed to us. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is something used by Psychiatrists to help patients gain control over their own mind, thoughts and emotions and to be able to manage them through practice. Psychotherapy is very effective and is often used as a means to help before turning to medications.
Practicing mindfulness is one good way to become more attuned to your own emotions (Charoensukmongkol, 2015). Through guided meditations, reflection, and other mindfulness interventions, you can start to observe your feelings and thoughts more objectively.
Compared to control groups, participants performed better at tests where they were required to categorize positive stimuli, leading the researchers to suggest that mindfulness practice can have a significant positive impact on the bias (Kiken & Shook, 2011).
By checking in on yourself and your thoughts throughout the day, you can start to recognize both helpful and unhelpful thoughts you are having. You can also look at your own behaviors too, for a better understanding of what’s serving you and what isn’t.
Are you reacting and responding to others and situations that arise with patience and kindness? OR are you wishing ill on someone for disagreeing with you and finding yourself without patience in everyday moments that normally you could manage more effectively?
From here, you can start to tackle these negative thoughts head-on. Challenging them and replacing them with more useful ones can help not only you but others as well.
(https://positivepsychology.com/3-steps-negativity-bias/)
"To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens" - Mark Twain.
It's time we start looking at just how good we really are and asking ourselves the tough questions!
Are we good enough to act against negativity and over come "bad" when its most important?
And hey ~ even better......maybe, just maybe by re-training ourselves to start looking, thinking and acting a different way we can be good!
Really Good!!
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