The bystander effect in the workplace. Learn intervention strategies to prevent violence at work.

Warning: This article discusses sexual misconduct, harassment and related themes that some readers may find distressing.

What is the bystander effect?

Picture a meeting where a senior manager makes a sexual comment about a junior colleague. Eight people hear it. Nobody says anything, and each of them later assumes someone else would have raised it if it mattered. That is the bystander effect: the more people who witness a problem, the less likely any one of them is to step in.

You will also see it called bystander apathy or bystander syndrome. Apathy is the wrong word for it. Most people in that meeting care. What stops them is the presence of everyone else.

The best-known of the early examples of the bystander effect is the murder of Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens, New York City, on 13 March 1964. Two weeks later The New York Times reported that 38 neighbours had seen or heard the attack and none had called the police. That figure was wrong. A 2007 review in American Psychologist by Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins found no evidence of 38 witnesses who watched and did nothing, and in 2016 the Times said its story had grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had seen. At least two people did call the police. The story still shaped decades of research, because the question it raised was a good one: why would more witnesses make help less likely?

The same dynamic shows up on a city street, on a university campus and in your workplace, and the people watching behave much the same way in each.

Diffusion of responsibility

The mechanism behind the effect is diffusion of responsibility. When you are the only person who sees something wrong, acting is plainly your job. When ten people see it, each person feels a tenth of that responsibility, and it is easy to decide the other nine have it covered.

Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané tested this in 1968 with students at New York University. Each participant sat alone in a booth and talked over an intercom with what they thought were other students. Partway through, one voice appeared to have a seizure. Of the participants who believed they were the only listener, 85 per cent reported the emergency before the voice cut off. Of those who believed four other people were also listening, 31 per cent did.

Every participant in the alone condition eventually went for help. In the six-person groups, only 62 per cent ever did. The researchers found that personality measures did not predict who helped. The number of other people did.

Apply that to a workplace. The more people who know something is wrong, the less likely any one of them is to act on it.

Passive bystander

A passive bystander sees something harmful and does nothing. Two pressures explain most of that silence.

The first is social norms, the unwritten rules about what people do in a given room. If nobody on your team has ever pulled someone aside over a sexist joke, the norm says you don't either. Being the first to speak can feel like accusing everyone else.

The second is social influence. People take their cues from each other. If nobody else looks concerned, you start to wonder whether you have misread the situation, and the group settles on the calmest reaction in the room.

The person on the receiving end pays for passive bystander behaviour. When colleagues watch violence against women or family violence and stay quiet, the victim is left exposed in the moment. They also learn that the behaviour is tolerated where they work. That second lesson does lasting harm, and it can leave the victim feeling isolated well after the incident is over.

Active bystander

An active bystander sees the same situation and chooses to do something about it. The difference between active and passive bystanders is the decision to act. They don't see more than anyone else.

Active bystanders stop incidents before they escalate. They promote respectful relationships at work, and they shift what the room treats as normal, so the next borderline comment gets a clearer response. A colleague who speaks up once makes it easier for the next person to do the same.

Being an active bystander takes no heroics. Direct confrontation is one option, and it is a poor fit when the person behaving badly outranks you or the situation could turn unsafe. In those cases you can get help from someone with more authority, or check in with the person affected afterwards. Bystander training programmes teach these options so people have a plan before they need one. The 5 Ds below set them out.

Differences in perceptions of sexual harassment

Under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), as the Australian Human Rights Commission explains it, sexual harassment is unwelcome sexual conduct where a reasonable person would have anticipated the possibility that the person harassed would be offended, humiliated or intimidated. Leering, unwelcome touching and suggestive comments can all amount to sexual harassment.

The trouble is that people disagree about whether a particular moment crosses the line. One person hears harassment where another hears banter. When a bystander isn't sure, they stay quiet, and that uncertainty also holds people back from stepping in when the conduct is sexual assault or violence. Anyone can be sexually harassed, but women experience it more often than men.

A shared understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment makes intervention far more likely. Training, awareness campaigns and clear workplace policies all build that understanding, and so does talking openly about the harm harassment does to the people on the receiving end.

Bystander effect in the workplace

Work brings together everything the bystander effect needs: groups of people, differences in status, and a lot riding on not making a fuss. Employees regularly see harassment, discrimination and other mistreatment. Many say nothing, especially when the person responsible is senior. That silence is what the bystander effect refers to in the workplace.

It adds up. Once a team learns that one manager's conduct is off-limits, each later incident gets quieter. Workplace bullying and harassment increase, morale drops, and the people targeted carry the cost on their own.

In Australia, inaction is also a legal problem. Since the Respect at Work amendments, section 47C of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) puts a positive duty on employers to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate sexual harassment, sex discrimination and hostile work environments. Our guide to the seven standards covers that legal obligation to address sexual harassment in detail. Separately, Work Health and Safety regulations now require you to manage psychosocial hazards in the workplace: eliminate the risk where you reasonably can, and minimise it where you can't. Failing to act can lead to legal claims, regulator action and penalties.

Bystander intervention strategies

Australian law makes you responsible for sexual harassment, discrimination based on an employee's protected attributes and bullying in your workplace. For sexual harassment and psychosocial hazards, it expects you to act before anyone complains. In New Zealand, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 defines health as "physical and mental health", so the harm these behaviours cause sits within your health and safety duties too.

The strategies below fall into three stages: before anything happens, in the moment, and afterwards.

Primary prevention strategies

Primary prevention is the work you do before any harm occurs. It goes after the causes: the attitudes, norms and power imbalances that make violence against women and other inappropriate behaviour more likely, along with the risk factors in your own workplace. 

Done well, it stops the first incident from happening. It also gives every employee a part to play, because those attitudes and norms are set by everyone in the room, from the newest starter to the leadership team. 

If you are working on positive duty compliance under the Respect@Work reforms, start with the Australian Human Rights Commission guidelines. They set out seven standards. They are not legally binding, but the Commission uses them when it assesses whether you have met the duty.

Training is the next piece. Good bystander training names the behaviours your workplace won't accept and rehearses specific responses. "Use your judgement" doesn't count as training. "If someone makes a sexual comment about a colleague at Friday drinks, here are three things you can do" does. Pair it with your policies on discrimination, harassment and misconduct, and keep those policies current and in front of staff. 

For medium-to-large businesses, universities and other large organisations, an anonymous reporting tool gives people a way to speak up freely without fear of retribution. That matters for bystanders, because the personal cost of being the one who raised it is what stops most of them. Some reporting tools also run pulse surveys, which you can use for culture audits. Together they surface problems earlier and help with the prevention of workplace misconduct.

Secondary prevention strategies: The 5 D's

Secondary prevention is about the moment itself: spotting an unsafe situation early and stepping in before it escalates or does more harm. Bystanders are central here, because they are the people present when it happens. The 5 Ds come from Right To Be, the US anti-harassment organisation formerly known as Hollaback!. They give you five options, so the choice is about which response fits the situation rather than whether to act at all.

Direct intervention

Address the behaviour yourself. Say calmly and clearly that the comment was inappropriate, or ask the person to stop. Keep it short and don't get drawn into an argument. The aim is to make it clear that the behaviour isn't acceptable at work without escalating things. Direct intervention carries the most personal risk of the five, so use it when you feel safe and have the standing to do it.

Distraction

Distraction interrupts the behaviour without confronting anyone. At work, that could mean changing the subject when the comments start, asking the person being targeted to help you with something in another room, or announcing that the pizza has arrived. Even "accidentally" dropping a stack of papers can break the moment. Nobody has to be called out for the behaviour to stop.

Delegation

Delegation means getting help from someone else. In the workplace, that could be a supervisor, an HR representative or another person with authority. It is the right choice when you lack the standing to step in yourself but know someone who has it.

Delay

Sometimes it isn't safe or practical to act on the spot. Delay is the option for those times. It means checking in with the person affected once the incident is over: ask how they are, offer support and talk through what they might want to do next. At work, that might be a quiet word after a meeting. "I saw what happened in there. Are you OK? Is there anything I can do?" The moment of the incident is rarely when the person can take it in, so coming back later matters.

Document

Write down what you saw. Note the date, time and place, who was involved and what was said or done. Keep copies of any emails or messages. If the issue escalates or a formal complaint is made later, your record becomes evidence. In an Australian workplace investigation, a clear contemporaneous record can support the victim's account and help the organisation take the right action against the person responsible. Ask the person affected before you share your notes, because it should be their decision what happens next.

Tertiary prevention strategies

Tertiary prevention comes after the harm has happened. The goals are long term: deal with the lasting effects of the violence, restore health and safety, and stop the person from being harmed again. Organisations do this through person-centred and trauma-informed responses that put the needs of the person harmed first. Bystanders contribute by continuing to support the victim, giving an honest account to any investigation, and pressing for consequences for the person responsible. Without consequences, every earlier stage of prevention loses credibility.

Example of bystander interventions: The Below Deck Down Under incident

Reality TV conflict is usually manufactured. What aired on Below Deck Down Under season 2 in August 2023 was not, and the crew's response is one of the clearest recent examples of bystander intervention in a workplace.

Background: In back-to-back episodes that aired in the US on 7 August 2023, two crew members were involved in separate incidents of sexual misconduct. After a night of drinking, bosun Luke Jones climbed naked into the bunk of stew Margot Sisson while she was trying to sleep. Margot later said she had not invited him in and had not realised he was naked. Separately, stew Laura Bileskalne got into deckhand Adam Kodra's bunk, gave him an unwanted massage and kissed his neck, although he had made clear he wasn't interested.

Intervention: The production crew, whose job is to stay out of the shot, broke the "fourth wall". Producers went into the cabin and removed Luke from Margot's bunk, and he slammed the door on them. Chief stew Aesha Scott raised the incident with Captain Jason Chambers, who fired Luke and took him off the yacht.

Aesha also told the captain about Laura's behaviour towards Adam, and about Laura's comments to Margot defending Luke. Captain Jason spoke with Margot and Adam separately, then terminated Laura's employment as well.

Actions and outcomes: Captain Jason gathered the crew to talk about consent and respect. He told them a cabin door is a boundary that nobody opens without consent. He treated both incidents as serious misconduct, and both crew members lost their jobs. After the episodes aired, he publicly thanked the production team for breaking the fourth wall and stepping in.

Viewers were alarmed by what they saw and widely praised the response. Margot thanked Captain Jason for his immediate response, thanked the producers who stepped in, and called Aesha's intervention "heroic".

Conclusion: Three different people acted here, and each one used a different option from the 5 Ds. The producers intervened directly in a situation that was getting worse. Aesha delegated by taking both incidents to the person with the authority to act, including the one involving Adam. The captain listened to the people involved and acted quickly. Any workplace can copy that pattern: someone acts in the moment, someone reports it, and someone with authority follows through.

MATE bystander program

The MATE Bystander Program is run by Griffith University's Violence Research and Prevention Program. MATE stands for Motivating Action Through Empowerment. It trains people to act against domestic violence, interpersonal violence and workplace sexual violence. It grew out of Mentors in Violence Prevention, a US programme that Griffith brought to Australia.

A 2022 evaluation by the Australian Council for Educational Research found MATE highly effective at equipping people to act against violence. Whichever provider you use, look for training that deals in specific situations: how to redirect a group conversation that has turned into harassment, or how to check in with a colleague after a meeting where something went too far. Workshops, webinars and interactive sessions all work, as long as people get to rehearse what they would say before they need to say it.

Bystander training works best when it is backed by research and updated as workplaces change. Programmes like MATE give your people the words to use, and give you something concrete to show when you are asked what reasonable steps you have taken.

Take action in the workplace

Sexual assault and harassment are serious breaches of professional conduct, and some of that conduct is criminal. Everyone in a workplace, from a new starter to the chief executive, has a responsibility to act when they see unlawful or harmful behaviour towards a colleague.

For you as an employer, the work is practical. Write clear policies against harassment and violence, and make sure people know what they say. Run regular bystander intervention training. Give people a whistleblowing hotline or anonymous reporting software so they can raise a concern without putting themselves at personal risk. Then follow through on every report, because people stop reporting the first time one is ignored.

The bystander effect is a predictable pattern in how groups behave, so the answer lies in how your workplace is set up. Build one where speaking up is expected and supported, and acting becomes the normal response.