The psychology of heroism: Why some people ran toward danger at Bondi Beach

Just before the mass shooting that left 15 dead and dozens more injured during a Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach, two elderly bystanders attempted to disarm one of the attackers.

In dashcam video, Boris Gurman can be seen grappling with an attacker while Sofia Gurman runs toward them. The couple was killed, but that didn’t stop others from also trying to stop the shooters.

Reuven Morrison, a 62-year-old grandfather, died hurling bricks at one of the gunmen. Ahmed al Ahmed, a father of two, was also shot but managed to wrestle the gun from an attacker.

The videos of people bravely springing into action at Bondi Beach have been watched by millions and might give the impression that such heroic behavior is common, said Dr. Ari Kohen, a political scientist at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of “Untangling Heroism.”

That impression is wrong. Typically, when others are in peril, people nearby remain bystanders, Kohen said.

“Most people don’t do this. It’s risky. It’s dangerous,” Kohen said.

But bystanders who become heroes – the people who run toward danger – may share some common traits or find themselves in circumstances that push them to spring into action. And there’s even the possibility that people can be trained to do it.

Few survivors or families of people killed at Bondi Beach have laid out exactly what made them step in, but those who’ve spoken out repeated phrases already familiar from people who put themselves in harm’s way.

“It’s the same sort of responses we get from heroes around the world. ‘I just did what I was supposed to do or what anyone would do,’ which we know isn’t true, but that is the refrain of almost every heroic actor,” said Matt Langdon, executive director of the Heroic Imagination Project, which says it “flips the script on passivity” through research and training on heroism. “They were compelled to do it. There wasn’t really an option.”

The story lodged in the memories of why people don’t step up to help others in distress is an infamous 1964 murder case. After 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her apartment in New York, it was believed that there were dozens of people who could have helped — but didn’t. The reported apathy of witnesses launched the story to new levels of attention and sparked changes that led to the 911 system and neighborhood watch programs.

The case was also the impetus for what’s known as the bystander effect: Social psychologists believed that when there are more people around, everyone felt less personal responsibility to take action because they assumed someone else will act.

But many of the details that drew attention to Genovese’s story have been debunked. Research showed that Genovese was stabbed twice. After the first stabbing, someone yelled out the window, scaring the assailant away, and neighbors called police. The incident also happened in the middle of the night, and some witnesses said they were uncertain about what they saw and did not necessarily understand that Genovese was in danger.

The bystander effect itself has not been completely debunked, but experts think it’s more nuanced: Large groups may be a little slower to react, but some people can and do step up in a real emergency, even if it goes against their natural instincts.

Heroes are rare in part because it takes a perfect storm in the brain to act, according to Dr. Steven Quartz, a professor of philosophy at Caltech who uses neuroscience to better understand the brain’s value systems.

Ultimately, humans have an overwhelming desire for self-preservation. Quartz said people generally have a default freeze or flight response to “lethal chaos,” particularly when the situation feels uncontrollable.

If someone is going to try to save a drowning child or a person who fell onto the subway tracks, a few key elements are needed for the brain to overcome its typical reaction to danger, Quartz explained:

Once they have that combination, they can quickly move from self-preservation to action.

Quartz says people don’t have to be in a “heroic” occupation to respond to these complex contextual clues. What it takes, in large part, is empathy.

He estimates that about 10% of the population has a natural trait that generates a high kind of empathetic response that can prompt brave action, but he doesn’t believe that such a trait is necessary for someone to become a hero.

“While we know there’s all the difference in terms of how much empathy people in general feel as kind of a default, we also know that can be modulated by how much we identify with someone else,” Quartz said.

Typically, people who have more empathy will act to protect those who are close to them, like a friend, a family member or even someone they identify with. That could be something as simple as a fan of the same football team, Quartz said.

On the surface, it may seem like those at Bondi Beach had little in common. “The number of Australian accents on the news was really low,” said Langdon, who is based in Australia.

The Gurmans were immigrants from Ukraine. Al Ahmed was a Muslim whose family was from Syria. Morrison was an Orthodox Jew who fled the Soviet Union. But Bondi Beach is well known as a safe place for diverse communities to come together.

“That probably played into the incident, as well. People were drawn from around the world, and they were having a good time together,” Langdon said.

Kohen cites other historic examples of people who risk their lives and have empathy for people with different backgrounds. For example, although most people did not protect Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust, an entire French village – Le Chambon-Sur-Lignon – worked together to save thousands of Jewish refugees. Residents hid people in their homes, provided forged identification papers and guided refugees to neutral Switzerland.

The village was predominantly Christian, Kohen said, but they were empathetic in part because they were Huguenots — a group that had been persecuted by Catholic authorities in France for centuries.

“They had a particular experience with religious persecution, so when these first Jewish refugees showed up and knocked on the door of the church, there was an immediate personal identification,” he said. “The people in that village had a much more expansive sense of empathy because they had a personal identification with people who were suffering in a particular way.”

Some of the Bondi bystanders who took on the shooters also said they were angry at what they saw happening, Langdon said. Studies of heroes in other disasters have said the same.

“When we see something that violently disagrees with our worldview, we are compelled to act,” Langdon said. “I think seeing a long gun like that on the beach in Bondi is so outside of what’s OK in this country that they just acted straightaway.”

Kohen says the attention paid to heroes on social media may be disproportionate to their actual number, but seeing these stories may create more heroes.

“It’s starting to get into the public consciousness that rescue is, while dangerous, something that ordinary people can do,” Kohen said.

Research shows that having role models or examples of heroic behavior can be a building block for people to take their own heroic action. Knowing that others step up can prompt people to think about what they would do in the same situation. Even watching movies or reading books about everyday heroes, or fictional heroes like characters in “Star Wars,” may have an impact.

“Building empathy across cultural differences is certainly much harder, but there are lots of low-cost ways to do that, including reading literature where you are getting inside someone else’s head and seeing why they make the choices they make. It’s a great way to build empathy,” Kohen said.

Heroism can also come through preparation; Al Ahmed had once been a police officer in Syria. But Kohen said people don’t have to go to the police academy to prepare for a hero’s work.

“There are things that we can teach people right away. Learn CPR, get trained on using an AED device, take a Stop the Bleed training,” he said. “When people have this in their tool kit, it seems very clear that you’re much more likely to be a helper, should the need ever arise.”

Kohen hopes that one of the biggest takeaways from Bondi Beach is that everyday heroism – when ordinary people do extraordinary things – is something anyone is capable of.

“These people are just like us,” he said. “Sometimes, people just find themselves in a terrible situation, and they act. That’s something possible for all of us.”