The Psychology of How We React to Witnessing Violence

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Renee Graham’s recent column in the Boston Globe (Graham, 2023) rightly calls what happened to Jordan Neely, who died after being grabbed in a chokehold by a fellow passenger on a New York City subway car, a “failure of humanity.” The story of his death isn’t about the so-called "mentally ill" — a convenient diversionary reframing that allows people to keep a safe distance from this type of horror and heartbreak (Margolies, 2023) Neely grew up victimized by traumatic violence and, like many trauma survivors, had his life trajectory sequentially and tragically derailed early on. Like his mother (a murder victim), he died in his 30s (Wilson and Newman, 2023), completing a cycle of intergenerational transmission of victimization.

The effects of childhood trauma on all aspects of development and future health are well documented (Strathearn et al., 2020). What happened to Neely as a child could have happened to any one of us if we grew up in his traumatic circumstances. Any child enduring the “toxic stress” of prolonged or major adversity, especially at critical sensitive periods of psychological and psychosocial development, is at significant later risk throughout their lives for poor outcomes on every front: physical and mental health, socioeconomic status, substance abuse, and victimization. The one consistent mitigating factor that buffers the effects of trauma is having had a relationship with an adult who is caring, responsive, and stable.

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The presence of a caring person at any time buffers the effect of stress. People heal in the context of relationships. As a psychologist, I view Neely’s agitated pleas as a desperate cry for help rather than an aggressive threat to harm others. That much seems obvious to me. He said he was thirsty, hungry, and “fed up.” Why didn’t anyone on that subway car have the instinct to hand him a bottle of water or a snack?

Have we lost our humanity? It’s hard to feel otherwise, reading and hearing the dehumanizing words used to describe Neely effectively making him a non-person — not “one of us” but just a scary Black man, a homeless person, one of the so-called mentally ill behaving erratically, someone we have to get off the streets and into an institution or get rid of altogether so we don’t have to feel anything.

Imagine what would have happened if one of the people on that subway car had felt something for Neely, shown him some kindness and respect, and tried to lend a helping hand. Or had the social courage and consciousness to stand up and yell, “Stop choking him! You are killing him!"

The psychology behind reactions to witnessing atrocities

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Pluralistic ignorance

The aggressive reflexes of some members of the group played out while the conscience and humanity of those who witnessed in silence may have been invisible but, I believe, palpable nonetheless.

The phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance is when people define an ambiguous situation based on the overt reactions of others, with everyone falsely concluding that they are the only one who feels differently, so no one speaks up, even, as in this case, to try to stop someone from being needlessly choked to death in front of them. (Levine et al., 2021; Stürmer et al., 2020)

The “freeze” response to fear

In the throes of frightening situations such as witnessing extreme violence, the fight-flight-or-freeze reaction can kick in. Most people are familiar with fight or flight, but freeze is the third, less talked-about, automatic reaction of the nervous system to fear and perceived threat.

It is a protective, dissociative response in humans and animals that kicks in by way of the parasympathetic nervous system. It evolved to help us be as still and quiet as possible to avoid detection and harm from predators in dangerous situations when neither fight nor flight is safe or possible. (van den Berg, R., & Neumann, R., 2018)

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It is adaptive during trauma to dissociate as a way of enduring unbearable pain and helplessness. But dissociation is also what enables people to inflict or bear witness to horrific events without emotion — failing to register what is happening, or to recognize the victim as real or personally relevant, and dissociating from their feelings and their own and others’ humanity, which otherwise connect them to their conscience.

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The same end result in effect occurs when people operate on autopilot (a form of dissociation) in going along with something perceived as a social norm, similar to groupthink, suspending their own critical thinking and participating in behavior that violates their own values or sensibilities.

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We haven’t lost our humanity but perhaps if we are more aware of what gets in the way of connecting to it, and how to come back, we will have a chance to act based on it - for our own and the common good.