The bystander effect is defined as "what occurs when the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency," and it results in a lot of horrible situations where a person is bullied, or left sick and hurt without receiving help from passersby.
While the bystander effect is a serious issue, one that many of us have found ourselves on either side of, not all bystanders freeze in public. There are those who see a stranger in need and jump in to help, consequences or awkwardness be damned.
In a popular Reddit thread, people shared stories of times they intervened for a stranger in danger, and it's a good reminder that we all have the ability to step in when needed.
1. From OP:
When I was in High School (about 14) I was cripplingly shy and kept myself to myself, I spent most of my time in the school library to be honest.
One lunch time I was walking across campus when I noticed a huge group of students from all years gathered in a circle around something that I couldn't see - I could hear girls squealing and shrieking and guys daring each other to pick "it" up. I also heard some dickish teenage boys daring each other to squash it or prod it with a stick. I then heard someone near the back of the crowd say it was a disgusting huge frog and they wouldn't touch it if someone paid them.
I couldn't believe people were being so pathetic about a frog, and even though I was metaphorically crapping myself and I'm sure I went bright red...I pushed my way to the middle of the circle, picked up the poor scared little frog and marched my way back out and down to the school fields with it.
I was terrified being a shy person with all these strangers staring at me but I wanted to get the frog away from the potential harm. Everyone just went quiet, stared at me then I could hear them all asking each other "who the f*ck was that?!" as I walked away.
It's not an amazing story but I still feel pretty bada*s for overcoming my social fears and potentially saving the frog :)
TL;DR - Saved a frog from a large group of evil teenagers
I was having lunch with a friend at a local restaurant that we would frequent in those days, so we got to know the servers pretty well. This one afternoon we had just ordered with our server and she turned around to head back to the kitchen. On her way there she passed another table she was serving where a single man was sitting. He stood up right in her path and at the top of his lungs screamed in her face, while waving his hands in the air "Where's my sandwich?!?!?!". Immediately without even thinking about it I yelled back "Sit down and shut up!". I surprised myself, my friend, the server and the man, but I'll be damned if he didn't do what he was told. The server escaped back into the kitchen area holding in her laughter.
A few years ago, I got off work at 1am and when driving home found an old lady in a hospital gown and shower cap lying in the center turn lane of a 4 lane road in a really bad neighborhood. I had forgotten my cell phone, so I had to go back about a mile to use a pay phone. I then went back and parked my car in front of her body with my high beams on to wait for medics.
Even at that time of night, there were a lot of people flying by while at the same time crack heads were walking too and from trailers near by. I was scared sh*tless. Eventually, a tow truck driver stopped and helped. Turns out he was a paramedic, but he didn't have a cell phone either. We waited with this unconscious lady for about 15 minutes before the ambulance finally found us.
I was terrified all the cars driving by would say I hit her. Turns out NOBODY bothered to call for this lady. She was still alive. I left before they loaded her into the ambulance. She will never know I was the one that watched over her to make sure no one ran her over.
I was seeing The Exploited in Portland. The band Virus 9 was their opener.
This huge, like 6'4" bulky guy, was being crazy, like he was having a bad trip on acid or something, and it made him really aggro. A bouncer was trying to get him to leave, and this guy pulled a knife on the bouncer (I was in between them, back up against a table with no where to go, not a good place to be) then BAM the singer from Virus 9 slaps the knife out of dudes hand and kicks the crap out of him.
In the process he knocked my camera out of my hands and the batteries spilled out. After the guy was dragged out, the singer came back, had a mini flashlight and helped me find my batteries. Cool f*cking guy.
I was on the bus when this idiot teenager decided to start throwing out parts of his lunch on the floor, including his coke can that wasn't quite empty. The lady beside me got fed up and picked up his shit and dumped it right onto his lap without saying anything. About 5 minutes later the kid (probably took him the whole 5 minutes to think of this) said:
"You're not going to save the world with your Green Peace sh*t lady."
To which the lady responds quite angrily with:
"I wasn't trying to save the world dickhead, your drink was spilling out onto people because you were too fucking lazy to hold onto it, so shut the f*ck up."
I guess that kid got embarrassed enough that day, and spent the rest of the bus ride looking at the floor.
I used to work at a Panera Bread in a very affluent neighborhood, and one of the regular customers, Mark, would always order the most time-consuming, off-menu items. He was known for being condescending and rude, and he'd bitch about how long it was taking, and he always complained about how we messed up his order. Every Wednesday and Saturday morning we had to deal with this prick.
One busy Saturday morning, a new girl had to take and fill his obnoxious order. So, of course she messed up a lot, considering it was her second day, and Mark launched into the most atomic dick-rage I have ever witnessed. One of our other regular customers, this sweet old (and I mean old) lady we called Aunt Mary, sauntered over to him, and smacked the sh*t out of him with her cane. Right over the back of his head.
"You say another word to her, I whack you in the f*ckin' balls," she says. Mark was totally stunned, speechless. He dipped out, and we never saw him again.
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen: I was in church one week and a new person walked in. He was around 25 or so, dressed in jeans and a short sleeve shirt and clearly uncomfortable. He sits down and people start giving him the stink eye. I quickly realize that they are staring at the copious amounts of tattoos he has. People start whispering to each other and the poor guy looks like he's about to just get up and leave.
All of the sudden, one of the church elders gets up. He's a very conservative guy, say about 75 years old. The type of guy who is always wearing a suit, even in the dog days of summer. He walks over to where the guy is sitting and says hello. I thought he was about to ask the guy to leave. The old guy says, "Don't let them bug you. You're not the only one with tattoos." He then takes off his suit coat and rolls up his sleeves. His arms are almost a solid block of ink. Apparently, when he was young, he was in the Navy and got a tattoo in almost every country he visited.
He spent the rest of the service hanging out with new guy and talked to him after service. The new guy has been coming ever since and no one judges him for his ink.
It was one of the ballsiest things I've seen someone do for a complete stranger.
When I was I guess about 18 or 19 I was home visiting my parents. I'd been out in the yard playing baseball with my little brother.
I was sitting on the porch when I saw our neighbor's wife run out the house with her child, her husband chasing her. As I'm watching the husband grabs her by the hair, punches her and starts dragging her back towards the house while their child watches.
My dad tells this story and says, "All I saw was you step into the house, pick up a Little Slugger and walk out the front door." By the time my dad got outside I had walked up to the guy, had the bat over my shoulder and was saying, "Let her go or I start swinging." By this point my dad and a couple other neighbors have run over and are standing with me. I said again, "You have till the count of three. I'm a state champion softball player."
The guy dropped his wife and ran back to the house. Police were called, the guy was arrested and the wife eventually left him.
My dad said seeing his teenage daughter threaten a grown man with a baseball bat was one of the proudest days of his life.
I have always hated how people talk down to fast food employees. One night (9 pm or so), some lady starts yelling at the guy at the Subway I was eating at, about he screwed up her sandwich. The guy behind the counter gets a quizzical look on his face, but doesn't say anything. She goes off on him for 20 seconds or so, and then throws the sandwich in his general direction.
I just couldn't sit there and watch this guy take it anymore, so I walk over, real calm with my hands in my pockets, and tell her she's disrupting my dinner and she needs to stop yelling. She yells at me that she'll stop yelling when he makes her a sandwich the right way, yada yada yada. So I ask her, real calm, "were you not standing right here when he made your sandwich for you?"
"Of course I was!" she replies.
"Did he not ask you what you wanted on the sandwich while he was making it?"
"Well, yes.."
So he put stuff on the sandwich that you didn't ask for?"
"Well, no..."
"Then shut the f*ck up, lady." I said. The guy starts grinning.
"You can't talk to me like that!!" She yelled.
"No, he can't talk to you like this. I don't work here. You are being rude, loud, b*tch, and you are interrupting my dinner. Now shut the f*ck up."
She sputtered for a minute about the half sandwich she threw at the guy, and the guy replaced it (I wouldn't have, but he didn't want t o get in trouble, so). She was quite polite, and took it to go. He brought me a cookie and said thanks, no one had ever stood up to a rude customer like that for him before.
When I was younger me and my dad were walking in a busy part of London (I think it was leicester square) and some teens came out of a Mcdonalds and threw some half used ketchup packets on the floor. My dad went up to them with a proper psycho look (also he's 6'4), had a go at them and told them to pick it up and throw it away which they did whilst looking pretty sh*t scared, it was awesome.
As a kid, I was playing with this other kid i had just met there in the local playground. He had brought his two action-figures with him: Batman and Dr. Freeze. We were playing around with these action-figures when these mean looking older kids came towards us. Without hesitation, I hid the action-figures in the sand. The kids then started to push us around and tell us we had to tell them where the action-figures where.
We both refused, and the mean kids eventually gave up and walked of. I then dug up the action-figures and gave them back to the kid. I never met him again, but I'm sure I'm with him in his dreams.
TL;DR: I saved Batman and Dr. Freeze from a gang of thugs. Edit: It's supposed to be "Mr. Freeze", not "Dr." from what I've seen in the comments. Still leaving it "Dr.", since that's what we were calling him in my neighborhood (didn't live in the US).
This wasn't me that did the saving but rather someone else told off a stranger in place of me.
I was working as a lifeguard on a military base, when a random spouse of a high ranking officer comes to the pool. She decides that she is above rules (and logic) and takes one of the six foot long lounge chairs (The long ones that people sunbathe at pools with) and places it on a 3 foot sidewalk, leaving the last three feet to hang over the pool. Now as a lifeguard, my job is mostly to enforce safety, and that breaks the fire codes, blocks a walking path, and most importantly, it's hanging over the pool (no matter how opposed to rescuing this lovely lady from the pool, I'd still have to rescue her). We inform her that she cannot do that, and that it is a safety issue. She ignores us, and after three times of telling her she cannot do that, we kindly inform her that she must leave the facility.
Now, this pool is a free service, so there is not any need to worry about a refund or anything. We just need to get her out of the facility. It is at this point she decides that she is above any of our rules and starts yelling at us. She has several kids, all are to young to stay at the pool by themselves, so we do not wish to call the cops on her at this point (having mom escorted out of the pool in handcuffs would be rather traumatizing for a young child, at least we guessed so). We try to calm her down and explain that she cannot stay at the pool and must leave now, by this time the head lifeguard is directly involved in talking to her. She gets more and more aggressive, and starts yelling even louder.
It is at this point my supervisor decides enough is enough, we need to call the cops to get her escorted from the building (remember this is a military base, so we're calling the military police, this was a huge decision on our part). As my lead is dialing she starts trying to guilt trip us, and starts spouting off the usual "My husband is colonel so and so, you better respect me" and that line of bullsh*t. She then decides it's time to play things up a notch and screams at us, rather loudly, "My husband is currently deployed to Iraq, you are supposed to support the families of people deployed!"
This got the attention of another guest in the area. This guest had a booming drill sergeant voice, and to add to it the facility had a nice echo to it as well. He says one line to her: "F*ck you lady. I'm going to Iraq next week." She stops dead, watches him walk out the entrance. At this point her mouth is agape, and she walks to her belongings, gathers them, and walks out the door with her kids. My supervisor tells the cop that everything's solved, and hangs up the phone.
TL;DR b*tch gets told by a pissed off soldier.
When I was about 15 or so, was driving home from a holiday somewhere and stopped in a country town (this is rural Australia). We stopped at a cafe next to a park and were having lunch; in the park next to us was a Chinese family having a picnic while their little girl (who was probably about three) was picking flowers.
Some old hag was walking down the road, saw the little girl had picked about two flowers, and proceeded to call her a 'stupid ch*nk', 'foreign brat' etc.
So us and everyone else in the cafe proceeded to stand up and call her all sorts of lovely things to the point where she drove off.
TL;DR: racist old woman was abusing a three year old.
I was on a train heading home and had just had a really long day. I was tired, nothing went well that day (got b*tched out by my boss for something I wasn't responsible for) and was just done with the day. I sat down, put in my earbuds and closed my ears for awhile. After awhile, I could here a growing ruckus coming from a few seats ahead of me. I rip out one earbud and hear three gentlemen (read: thugs) giving an old man a hard time.
For over 10 minutes I listened as these punks berated this old man for literally everything and anything. They said he was too old and should just do the world a favor and kill himself, claimed to have sex with his grandchildren, said he contributed nothing to the world and that he was so weak that they'd probably kill him with one punch. After awhile the old man decided to speak up and said that he was a war veteran and had fought in Vietnam and had accomplished more in his life on this earth than any of these three fine scholars would ever hope to do.
That's when I reached my tipping point with these kids. After saying this, one of the kids retorts: "I don't give a f*ck about Vietnam, I hope you lost friends back there. I hope you realize that you're responsible for their deaths". That's when I lost my shit. I got out of my seat and stormed over there. Now, I'm not a big guy by any means but I was tired, pissed off and just finished listening to a healthy dose of death metal so I was a wrecking ball of hostility, rage and fortitude.
I got into these kids' faces and said, "You are perhaps the most ungrateful, selfish and despicable pieces of scumf*ck that I have ever seen. The fact that you have the audacity to question this man's service to your country, let alone belittle him for as long as you have shows me that you have no redeeming qualities as a human being. You are vile, degenerate trash and if you say another word to this man, I will personally throw you off of this train. You are a disappointment as a member of my species and I hope that you realize one day that this 'tough guy' attitude that you're flaunting accomplishing nothing and will one day result in a similar situation like this, but with you getting your face smashed in. Now take a seat and shut up or get off at the next stop. The choice is yours."
Now, right after saying this, I realized that I was outnumbered 3 to 1. However, these three punks were taken aback at the verbal lashing I had just given them and said nothing for what seemed like an eternity. After awhile, I realized I had won: the especially heinous one just looked to his feet, turned around and sat down. His two buddies followed suit. The next stop they got off. Old man thanks me, I thank him and I go about my day.
TL;DR - thugs give old man hard time on train, insult him for his service, I go apeshit on them, they back down and leave, I win.
My mom and I have a knack for being in these situations. We honestly don't look for them, but we have a lot of weird stories. In high school I was a lot like you. I was shy, ate outside the library at lunch while reading. I saw 3 girls on my right a few yards away yelling at another girl. The girl being yelled at seemed to be really scared and the 3 girls loved it. They started grabbing her by the hair and punching her in the face. I ran over and started pushing them off of her. They were confused for a second, but started at me. I'm 5'2", 110, and the only fights I've ever been in were fake cage matches with my cousins and brothers. Apparently that was enough, because I was able to fight them off well enough for them to run away. I went to my next class with a swollen lip, beginnings of a black eye, and some bruises, but otherwise fine.
There are more stories, but another time I saw a girl getting beat up in her boyfriend's car behind me while I was stopped at a red light. I wanted to get out and beat the shit out of him, but I couldn't as I had my 2 year old in the car. Instead I had the cars around stop, blocking him in (it was easy since everyone saw what was happening). I called 911 and started describing the man and the girl and giving the license plate number. Once he saw me on the phone he stopped choking his girlfriend and got out of the car to tell me to stop. I hopped back in my car, locked the doors, and watched as another passerby saw that he was coming for my car and started to kick his a*s. After the smoke settled I asked my hero to give me his address. I delivered some baked goods as a thank you. As an ex marine he seemed to like them.
I was once in Subway and one of the people serving was Eastern European. She had a tiny bit of an accent, but nothing major. There was this guy in front of me who was basically treating her like scum the whole time. He was on his mobile and barking his order at her. Now, I've worked in retail and I hate people being jerks to retail workers, so this was really pissing me off.
We'd managed to make it along to the salad bit (he'd made her repeat everything she'd said like three times, repeatedly stating how he couldn't understand her), when the girl was reaching over for something (She was quite small). A tiny bit of her shirt went on his sandwich, but he completely lost his sh*t. He started yelling loudly at her, "Get your f*cking shirt out of my sandwich. This is ridiculous! We can't even employ people who speak English and aren't completely brain dead! etc etc..."
I just snapped. I turned to him and said loudly, "Look Mister, where I'm from, people don't act like complete entitled cunts in shops, especially to hard working immigrants. If you don't shut the f*ck up and buy your goddamn sandwich, I am going to call the police and tell them that you are acting in a threatening and racist manner and I am fearing for my safety." (I am a 5ft3ins girl, and he was a 6ft tall guy.).
People in the queue applauded, guy went bright red and stormed out (without his sandwich). Girl behind the counter looked really relieved and said, thank you. Guy at the checkout gave me my foot long tuna for free!
TL;DR Stood up for poor Subway girl being harassed by jerk. Instant sandwich karma.
Just did last Saturday. Went to the laundromat to wash some blankets. A girl claimed the dryer ate about 24 cents. While loading the washers across the building I hear the girl start screaming at the woman that worked there alone. Pretty sure she was mid sixties. Then proceeded to start spitting on her and kicking her etc. her boyfriend that was with her was just egging it on telling the owner she was going to prison and that they were going to sue the place, even to the extent that the girls mom was going to come down and beat her a*s.
Being a bigger guy at 6-7" went over to help the owner as soon as I figured out what the hell was happening. Held the girl back and her boyfriend while she was trying to attack the poor woman. Told her to go into the office lock the door and call the cops, which she did thankfully. Get the couple to settle down and leave after the girl kicked some sh*t baskets dryers, hell whatever was around her got kicked. Cops showed up about 30 minutes later talked to me and the woman, after everything blew over and the couple left she came and talked to me while I finished folding my stuff.
Told me that she was happy that someone there helped and that she had just gotten a pacemaker a week before. Went and bought her some water to help her settle down since she was still crying. Left my number with her incase she needed a witness or anything. Hope to restored some faith in humanity for that lady.
TLDR; senior assaulted at laundromat by 20 something couple. I intervened.
My SO did once. A group of football players were mocking a clearly autistic/aspergers girl, and he got up and gently led her away while telling them off. It was the sexiest thing I have ever seen a man do, and that was the point that I figured out I was in love with him.
We've been together 7 years now.
I am usually a coward, and wish I could man up more. But there was an incident once where this teenage brat prob 15 or so was squirting water onto the back of an older lady with shopping bags as she was walking trying to get away from the situation. He was probably a younger brother of someone, because he was with a group of five older teenagers. Any way he pissed me off so much, I grabbed his his scrawny arm, pushed him against the wall and said "what the hell do you think you are doing to that lady". The little sh*t quickly shut up and got very quiet. The other guys just stood there without intervening.
When I let go of the scumbags' arm he and the other guys walked off without saying a word. When I was about 25 meters away from them the little dick knob regains his courage and yells something muffled at me. Let's hope next time he decides to be a public pest someone someone will leave him in a state of being unable to talk back.
When I was 3 weeks into my first year in Korea I was laying in bed covered in sweat. I was not prepared for the sheer humidity. Being unable to sleep I opened my balcony window and hoped the breeze would knock me out. As I was drifting in and out of consciousness I was woken by a woman's screams. I got up and stumbled out on to the balcony to see where this was coming from. Looking down at street level I just caught sight of a woman being dragged around the corner by her hair.
I was shocked, but I threw on a shirt and my shorts and laced up my steel toe boots. I ran out of my tiny apartment and down the stairs. I could still hear her crying and a male voice yelling. I didn't understand much of the language at this point either. At the bottom of the stairwell I ran out into the courtyard where a man was yelling at a woman sitting on a swing.
Tears running down her face. He was making threatening gestures and the only word I understood I heard her say. "Stop" "Hajuma!" She cried, so not knowing what was up I said "Hey! What's going on?" They obviously didn't speak English because the guy started to shoo me away and I just stepped up shaking my head. She took the opportunity to get away and ran in the direction behind me. He just watched her go and looked at me, then he shook his head and walked in the other direction.
There was no ninja fight that day, but I hope I did something good. Maybe she was a thief, maybe she cheated on him, but the only thing I was sure of is that she was hurt, she was scared and he dominated her physically.