The Bystander Effect

On the Older Adult Population of our Churches.

I remain very curious as to the reasons why people (especially church leaders) do not seem eager to address the issues surrounding the impressive opportunity for churches to serve as a resilience-building resource for the older adult segment of their congregation – for the older adults who tend to face difficult changes in themselves and their life circumstances with every passing year.

A number of years ago, The Greater Good (published by The University of California, Berkeley) posted a challenging article titled, “We Are All Bystanders”.  Remember from your introductory psychology classes the classic bystander story, here noted by Dachner Keltner and Jason March in the Fall/Winter 2006-07 issue of The Greater Good.

“Among the most infamous bystanders are the 38 people in Queens, New York, who in 1964 witnessed the murder of one of their neighbors, a young woman named Kitty Genovese.  A serial killer attacked and stabbed Genovese late one night outside her apartment house, and these 38 neighbors later admitted to hearing her screams; at least three said they saw part of the attack take place. Yet no one intervened.”  (They all surmised that if it were important or possible to intervene, somebody else would be doing it.)

Are most of us bystanders as we watch our older parishioners face difficult changes in their life?  Even if we understand that it takes frequent emotionally positive experiences to enable older adults to find well-being as they age, do we, like most “bystanders in a crowd” just assume that if it were really important or possible, somebody else already would be doing it?

Furthermore, even if we do think somebody should be creating ways for older adults to find meaning in their daily life, who do we “name” as responsible for doing that?  Do we expect our pastors to take on yet more tasks?  If so, what do we expect them to stop doing do in order to open up some time?  Do pastors expect the age-mates of older person’s to become more active in addressing these issues?  Who then do the pastors trust among the older adult community to understand the situation, recognize and appreciates how we all differ, and also to have the self-assurance to take action in partnership with others?  Should the middle-aged parishioners who run everything else in the church like a business, take on one more management tasks?  How about the youth?  Yes, how about the youth?

There is of course that pressure to be a bystander from our sense of a social-norm.  We don’t want to take action and then look foolish because there was no problem to fix or we did it all wrong.  The theories of those who study the bystander affect identify what they call “pluralistic-ignorance”. This is a sense that not only does the “crowd” (the congregation) not truly see the problem, but if they see it, they really don’t know what they should do. 

My take on an important reason for the bystander effect in this case is that in addition to the sense that if it were important or possible somebody else would be doing it, we live in a contemporary culture that “believes” in individualism.  That is, if older adults face difficulties of one sort or another, well, there are plenty of professional options to help, so let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  Even though that “belief about individualism as human nature” is false, and often harmful, especially for older adults, it can serve as a barrier to a groundswell of action.

There can be an upside to being a bystander who at least notices the issues;  they can say to others, as Dachner Keltner writes in the above mentioned article, “That sounds bad.  Maybe we should do something.”

Bruce