Would you actually call for help if you saw someone in trouble — or would you quietly assume someone else already had it covered?
Today's episode digs into one of the most eye-opening psychological biases from The Tuttle Twins Guide to Beware Your Bias: the bystander effect. It's the counterintuitive reason that being surrounded by more people when something goes wrong often makes it LESS likely that anyone actually helps, not more — and Brittany is quick to point out that this isn't because people are secretly bad or uncaring. It's just how our brains are wired when responsibility gets spread across a crowd.
Brittany breaks down exactly why our minds default to assuming "someone else will handle it" the moment we're not alone, and why that same freeze response shows up even when we're completely by ourselves and unsure what to do. She shares two genuinely nerve-wracking personal stories to make the psychology concrete: agonizing over whether to call the fire department about a neighbor's smoke alarm that wouldn't stop (and being terrified of getting in trouble over a possible false alarm), and the time she found a man face-down near a park and had to decide, alone and scared of being wrong, whether to call 911.
She also walks through the book's example featuring Ethan and Emily, who spot someone lying in a strange position near a park and have to talk themselves out of the same excuses adults use — "he's probably fine," "someone else will help" — before finally checking on him. It turns out he'd had a heart attack, and their choice to act may have saved his life.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- What the bystander effect actually is, and why being in a bigger crowd can make people less likely to get help, not more
- Why "diffusion of responsibility" makes each individual in a group feel less personally accountable for stepping in
- The specific psychological reasons we freeze: fear of being wrong, fear of the unknown, and not wanting to overstep or embarrass ourselves
- Brittany's own story of debating whether to call the fire department over a neighbor's blaring smoke alarm — and what the firefighters actually told her afterward
- Why people worry about "abusing" 911 for a non-emergency, and why acting anyway is usually still the right call
- How Ethan and Emily's encounter with a stranger in the park (from The Tuttle Twins Guide to Beware Your Bias) illustrates the bystander effect in action, and what it cost them not to just walk away
- Brittany's real experience finding a man face-down near a park, and how she talked herself through the fear of being wrong long enough to call for help
- Why you don't need medical training or total certainty to help — sometimes just staying with someone, getting an adult, or simply raising awareness is enough
- The important difference between actually helping and pretending to have skills you don't have, like performing CPR without training
- Why simply knowing about the bystander effect is often enough to help you catch yourself in the moment and act differently
- Why social media has added a new twist to the bystander effect, with some people filming instead of calling for help
Timestamps
0:00 Why Being in a Crowd Doesn't Guarantee Someone Will Help
0:48 The Bystander Effect, Revealed
1:15 Diffusion of Responsibility: "Someone Else Will Do It"
2:21 Naming the Bias — and Other Reasons We Hesitate
2:40 A Personal Story: The Smoke Alarm Dilemma
4:19 "What If Helping Makes It Worse?"
5:20 Why Our Brains Freeze in the Face of the Unknown
6:18 Ethan and Emily Learn the Bystander Effect
7:11 A Second Personal Story: The Man in the Park
8:29 What You Can Do Without Being a Trained Responder
10:16 Wrap-Up: Awareness Is Half the Battle
👍 Like this video if you've ever hesitated to help because you assumed someone else would
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💬 Comment below: Have you ever caught yourself freezing up in a moment like this — what did you end up doing?
Shop Resources
📘 Learn what it really takes to step up and do the right thing in The Tuttle Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes
https://www.tuttletwins.com/products/the-tuttle-twins-guide-to-courageous-heroes
📘 See what happens when people take responsibility instead of waiting for someone else to act in The Tuttle Twins and the Search for Atlas
https://www.tuttletwins.com/products/the-tuttle-twins-and-the-search-for-atlas
📚 Get Tuttle Twins books and homeschool resources: https://tuttletwins.com
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Read Transcript ▾
Hello everybody welcome back to another episode of the way the world works today We're gonna talk about one of the biases in the guide to be where your bias Which sounds creepy because it is if you don't if you're not aware of it, and you don't know how to stop it So we're gonna talk about one called the bystander effect now bystander think of somebody standing by Have you ever seen a movie where like somebody faints or something and then somebody shouts coal 911? All right, and in our heads. We're thinking. Oh good. They're in a crowd. Somebody faints
It's perfect. You want to be if something bad happens. You don't want that to happen But if something bad happens at least they're in a crowd There's lots of people there tons of people to call 911. There might even be a doctor there perfect Wrong so the thing is when you see in those movies somebody call 911 Somebody shout that the odds of somebody actually calling 911 are very slim because when you're just in a group of people and you Shout out an order people aren't gonna help and I know that that sounds crazy and you think like well are people bad?
Why wouldn't people do that and no that's not what it is It's that when you're in a crowd and somebody says go call 911 We don't feel personally responsible for that We feel also like someone else is gonna do it and this is like a psychological thing. We are not bad people It's just the way we're wired. So if somebody shouts, you know go get help We assume someone else is going to do it and why wouldn't they it's a huge crowd
But if I assume that and the person next to me assumes that and the person next to that person assumes that nobody's calling to get help What are we doing instead? Sometimes we're filming on our cell phones like oh something they say cell phone probably smartphone I'm talking like an old person guys speaking like an old person But you know sometimes we've even pull out our cell phones I did it again hilarious pull out our smart phones and record so that we can
Host it on social media and oh look at this big thing that happened instead of getting help instead of calling help But we stand around and we watch and again this doesn't mean that we are bad people It just means that in our minds we don't feel like there's a personal responsibility for us to do something If somebody just shouts in a crowd go do something we don't know who they're talking to maybe we don't even know Maybe they were talking to one person. We don't know so that is this this bias This is this thing called the bystander effect. So it's not just this feeling of somebody else is gonna do it
There's also some other parts to it, right? Maybe we'll think like I'm not trained. I can't help with that or you know What if I'm wrong? What if that person didn't really call help? I think I would feel this way. I think I'd be like I'm so timid that I would think like Okay, actually here's a here's an example of this my neighbor's smoke alarm We have very sensitive smoke alarms in my apartment building
But my neighbor's smoke alarm was going off for like it had to have been 20 minutes now Everyone's smoke alarm in this building goes off every now and then you could be cooking boiling water and it will go off So we all kind of know To dismiss it to some extent, but I realized it hadn't gone off and my neighbors were not home and in my head I was thinking like I don't want to call the fire department and
You know I don't want them to yell at me if I bring them all the way out here And there's no big deal and then I was like, you know what it's probably fine I bet one of my neighbors will do it one of my upstairs neighbors is very like good about being very action-oriented about the stuff So I'm just gonna let someone else do it. I don't want to be wrong I don't want to call the fire department and get in trouble or something so
Then I'll be honest. I Couldn't get the thought out of my head because the alarm kept going off And I was thinking you know, I have a cat I don't want my cat to get harmed if there's a fire and I have to take her out And I don't want anyone else to get armed either So I called the fire department and I would get it was so scared of getting in trouble
Because I think you know we're taught you should never call 911 unless there's a real emergency and I'm thinking like well What if this isn't an emergency and I call but when the fire department got here I apologize profusely because as it turned out it was fine It was just a malfunction, but they did they think to me they actually said no you did the right thing It's better for you to have called than to not have called and something to have been wrong So if you're worried about that, then I that's just a good story to tell you that
It's probably better for you to do that than to than to not just in case So there's other people who think in this, you know If you're in a crowd back to the other examples that maybe to think like what if I help and it makes it worse You know if no one else this is another big one if no one else is doing anything then it must not be serious And how funny is that we're thinking that one we're all thinking that and so nobody's doing anything So this is one of those really crazy just psychological things that we do that we think that it's you know
If we're in a crowd and we hear somebody shout for help We just we have all these reasons of why not to help or why we shouldn't why it's not even important for us to help or maybe They were talking to us at all But isn't that interesting that we have almost a false sense of security when we're in a crowd and we think Okay, well at least I'm around people. I'm not alone So then I will I will be you know
I have a better chance of being helped and as it turns out, that's not the case and again One of the big things I want to stress that I've said a couple times what I really wanted to bring it home is that You know, we're not bad people because we have these Hesitas we have we are hesitant to help when we hear somebody say help, you know, call 911 We don't shut down because we're bad people our brains shut down We kind of freeze just because we're unsure and my goodness. It's that fear of the unknown
That's human beings man. We do not like fear of the unknown. Our brains just don't know how to handle it And so there's the diffusion of responsibility like we tell ourselves like there are other plenty, you know plenty of people around to help The I'm not a doctor feeling is sure is absolutely the unsure feelings, right? Because we're thinking like well I don't want to go and say I'll help and then people think I can do CPR when I can't do CPR or something like that
And then of course like my example with a fire department, you don't want to be embarrassed You don't want to offer unwanted help and like nowadays with social media You think like well, maybe someone's just filming a TikTok video Maybe they don't really need help and we are so unsure that we start overthinking it and that we're scared of doing that So we freeze and again, it's a human thing to do. We're not bad people But but we need to be aware that this is what's happening in the be where you're bias book in the bystander effect chapter
You have Ethan and Emily have a learn a lesson with the bystander effect When they're playing with some friends near a park and they see somebody just laying in the ground and kind of a you know weird position This is me But he wasn't doing that but in a weird position and you know their friends are like oh, he's probably fine He's probably homeless. He's probably you know, whatever just leave him alone It's somebody else will help him and they give all these reasons that we talked about here
But Ethan and Emily just couldn't they couldn't shake it, right? They couldn't shake it off. They were thinking like no You know if that was somebody we knew wouldn't we want them to help us if it was us Wouldn't we want to be helped and so they end up going over to the man and calling for help And it turns out he had had a heart attack and so it was such a good thing that they helped him Because if not who knows how the situation would have turned out as I was reading this I was remembering this happened to me a couple years ago similar with the fire department where I was walking near a park
And I saw somebody face down in the ground and at first I'm like, okay What do I do? I can't walk and I can't pretend like I didn't see it, right clearly I saw it in my head again I'm like well somebody else will call and I really wrestled back and forth with this and I ended up calling 911 And it was funny because they were like well go over like poke him and see what he's doing and I was like man I am five foot two and a small female. I'm not gonna go poke this strange man in a park But I did call them and they were nice when I told them that I did call them and say like listen
I don't know what's going on. I don't know if this is an emergency all I can tell you is when somebody is laying face down in the dirt It doesn't seem great. So They came I actually don't know what happened I what I did have to leave but once I once I called the police and they told me that they were for sure on their way I at least felt better. They knew exactly where they were But it's one of those another one of those instances where I had to make that decision and I was scared
I was so scared to be wrong But man, you know, maybe maybe like the the Ethan and Emily Example, maybe that could have been something that saved somebody's life Now when we talk about this and we talk about maybe being more responsible if we hear somebody say help, you know We're calling 911. I do want to say that I'm not saying that you should go over there and start saying like well
Let me try to do CPR when you have no CPR training No, because that would also be wrong. It would be misleading. So that might not be acting right? You're not a doctor. So you're not gonna go act like a doctor. You can't you don't have those skills Maybe you don't know CPR. Maybe you don't know how to do these things But sometimes just you know sitting with the person in tell until help is on the way getting an adult Just raising awareness can help fix that problem because the bystander effects like I said is very very real
I think we all like to think that if we're in that situation if we are in a situation where someone needs help That we will automatically do the right thing and it's so much harder when it happens It's like the smoke alarm with my with my neighbors where I'm thinking Okay, it's been going off for 10 minutes now. If this were a fire We need to act quickly. I don't want to be wrong But what's at stake if I'm if I'm not wrong. So we have to kind of get over it our own
Freezing how we freeze and we don't know what to do. We have to get over that People you should never call 9-1-1 if it's not something that you could be an emergency You know, we don't want you don't want to abuse that you don't want to call for no reason But if there is something like somebody lying down in the park and you don't know what's wrong with them Absolutely, you know if there's something where it looks like there is an emergency and you're not sure just say that too You can say I'm not sure and so bystander effect is really interesting
And to me I love these little Psychological things our brains do because even though it's not an issue the best thing that we freeze like it's crazy That is humans. We all do that. It's crazy that it's something like our default that we all will just do We all freeze when it comes to things like that So being aware of it is half the battle now
You can kind of check yourself and try to change that if you notice you're doing that So we will leave it there guys. Don't forget to pick up be where your bias There are so many good things and you'll read them and like the bystander effects like me You'll be like wait, I kind of did that once or oh, I need to get better at that So it's really interesting. So pick up your copy your family will love it read it discuss it at the dinner table I think these are really good topics to discuss with your family and loved ones
So we will leave it there as always don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast and until next time I will talk to you later