An economic analysis of apathetic behavior: Theory and experiment

The apathy of bystanders often prevails when instances of bullying, hidden crime and extortion occur in communities such as schools, business work areas, underclass ghettos, prisons and the military. The present study models apathetic behavior as a non-cooperative game and attempts to verify this theory through experiments. Furthermore, our research suggests that the apathy of bystanders generally decrease as the number of citizens in a community decrease. In our experimental cases, if the number of members in a group decreases from 40 members to 20 members, the concerned and helpful behavior of bystanders increases by 21%.