A Failure of Nerve
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part Three
Greta Thunberg summed it up rather nicely when she equated the planet’s plight to a burning house. So why aren’t we grabbing the fire extinguishers, or at least running for the nearest exit? Instead we’re reacting with roughly the same level of panic Willy Wonka managed when he dryly called out “Help. Police. Murder.” while watching Augustus Gloop fart himself to his demise.
There’s a fable psychology loves for exactly this. Put a frog into a pot of boiling water and it leaps straight out. Put it into cold water and heat it slowly, and the poor creature stays put, gently cooking to death.¹ I haven’t tested this myself, you’ll be relieved to hear, but within the framework of our own situation it feels pretty spot on.
The master yoga teacher Anand Mehrotra believes we are a species in crisis, that “we are designing our own suffering,” and that we have to ask ourselves what it actually means to be human. If I belong to a species that expresses itself in violence, then I am capable of violence, the way a monkey is capable of being a monkey. Only by facing that do we make transcending it available to us. And the violence Mehrotra means isn’t just violence in the traditional sense; it’s every act that causes suffering. (Stop hitting yourself, as Bart Simpson would say.)
But here’s the thing about the burning house: it usually has a crowd standing outside it. And crowds, it turns out, are precisely the problem.
In 1968, Bibb Latané and John Darley staged a now-famous experiment. They placed participants in a room with an actor who pretended to have a seizure, and watched to see who would help. What they found was that a person’s willingness to step in depended almost entirely on how many other people were present. The more witnesses, the less likely any single one was to act. They called it the diffusion of responsibility: in a group, we each quietly assume someone else will handle it.
The story usually told alongside this is the murder of Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death over a horrifying stretch of time while, we were told, dozens of neighbours looked on and did nothing.² Whether or not the details were as reported, the psychological point stands: participants in these studies didn’t just freeze out of apathy. They froze because they assumed others were more capable, because they didn’t want to look foolish, and because they were reading the room to decide whether acting was even appropriate: a tidy little trap called pluralistic ignorance.
George Marshall, who has spent his career studying why we collectively fail to act on climate change, lands in a similar place. He argues that it’s social conformity that keeps us from stepping outside the accepted norms, a defence mechanism baked in by evolution to keep us safely inside the pack. We are, in other words, forever performing a balancing act between the real external threat and the social one. And for most people, most of the time, the fear of standing out beats the fear of the fire.
Which is a sobering thought. It means our inaction isn’t really a failure of information (we have the information), nor even a failure of goodness. It’s a failure of nerve, dressed up as etiquette.
So if fear of looking foolish is strong enough to keep us watching a house burn, we’d better understand what actually moves people to help. Is it goodness? Or is it just the feeling of being watched? That’s next.
Notes
The boiling frog isn’t real. I should be honest: biologists have tested this, and frogs absolutely do jump out as the water heats, so the fable is false. I’m keeping it anyway, because it’s too good a metaphor to lose, but I don’t want to pass it off as fact. Consider this the asterisk the frog deserves.
The Kitty Genovese story was exaggerated. The original “38 witnesses who saw and did nothing” account, which launched a thousand psychology lectures, was later shown to be significantly overstated: some people did call for help, and the number of true witnesses was far smaller. The bystander effect is real and well-replicated; the founding anecdote just isn’t as clean as the textbooks made it. Worth knowing, and worth saying out loud.