IV.

 

Darley and Latane's work can usefully be applied to the Bosnian emergency by examining the various stages that the bystander goes through before actually acting. With some slight reworking of their categories, I take there to be five stages: notice, definition, decision, assignment, and implementation. The bystander's attention must be forcibly drawn to the event so that she realizes something unusual is happening (notice); she must then recognize the event as an emergency, and not simply an ordinary event that appears to be an emergency (definition); she must then find conclusively good reasons for action (decision); and then determine who should act (assignment); and finally commit to some particular action and see that it is done (implementation). If an ambiguity is introduced at any stage—“Did I actually hear someone cry for help, or was that the sound of the television in the next room?” —the decision procedure is aborted and the cycle must begin all over again. This anxious cycling, not apathy, is what Darley and Latane found to be the state of mind of the persons who failed to intervene in the Kitty Genovese case. In the example of Bosnia, there were frequent efforts by government officials to introduce ambiguities into the debate, no doubt because these officials had real doubts themselves as to the true nature of the facts, but also because they wished to deflect public calls for action that they believed would be futile or counter-productive, while the Serbs maintained what might well be called a “strategy of ambiguity” in order to prevent Western intervention.