Examples of Bystander Syndrome depicted in Literature.
- In Across the Universe (Beth Revis), Amy is nearly raped in public during the Season. When she screams for a couple of people nearby to help, one of them just smiles and tells her to calm down and stop struggling, or she'll get hurt. Given that everyone present but Amy is under the effect of very potent mood-altering drugs, it at least is justified.
- In K.A. Applegate's Animorphs, initially, the kids see the Yeerk war as strictly between the Andalites and the Yeerks, which is why Marco is so against getting involved. However, when Jake learns Tom is a Controller, the kids realize that the stakes are much closer to home than previously thought. By the end of the series, the kids have lost their faith in the erstwhile Andalite reinforcements, and have concluded that the Andalites think it's All Up to You.
- Beast Tamer: Deconstructed. When Arios sees a demonnote rampaging around town, he decides not to participate in the fight against him under the excuse that the demon was a small fry and that the local adventurers are more than enough to defeat it, never-mind the fact that he's the hero and defeating demons is supposed to be his duty. He wanted to minimize his involvement and hoped the demon would kill Rein, but he failed to take into account that even if his plan succeeded, the nosedive it would take to his reputation due to his inactivity would still occur. Needless to say, by the time the dust settled the populace sees him as a coward and next to the lord and Edgar he's the most hated person in town.
- In A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book of A Song of Ice and Fire, the senior members of the Night's Watch are indifferent to the plight of wildling refugees at the ruined settlement at Hardhome, largely because of long-standing hatred towards the wildlings, the fact most of the refugees are women and children who can't fight, and mounting a rescue effort will cost the Watch more of its already meagre resources. Jon Snow, however, points out why doing nothing isn't an option...namely because when the wildling at Hardhome have died from either starvation or the cold, the Others will use their necromancy to reanimate the dead refugees, giving them thousands more undead soldiers to throw at the Watch.Jon Snow: Are you so blind, or is it that you do not wish to see? What do you think will happen when all these enemies are dead? Let me tell you what will happen. The dead will rise again, in their hundreds and their thousands. They will rise as wights, with black hands and pale blue eyes, and they will come for us.
- The Stephen King and Peter Straub collab Black House takes this to an extreme. When word gets out that Irma Freneau's corpse has been found in an abandoned restaurant, the cops have to block off the road to deter literally dozens of people who want to come up to the crime scene and stomp all over it to have a look for themselves. One such couple demands to be allowed up so they can take home a keepsake, while another violently informs the officer that he is a hellbound sinner for daring to deny her access.
- A massive amount of fairy tales rendered by The Brothers Grimm has a notable number of examples, usually with at least one character in each fairy tale being someone who could've easily opposed the main villain but in the end, lets them do as they please before the plot/protagonist fixes the mess themselves.
- The premise of Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, and The Film of the Book, in which a woman tortures her foster daughter to death, and everyone who sees either ignores it or participates. The true story it's based on is even worse.
- In the Gone series, 90% of the Perdido Beach kids have this attitude. An apartment is burning down with a kid inside? Sam can deal with it. We're running out of food? Sam can find more. The Human Crew is running around trying to kill the mutants? That's the Sam's problem, not ours. Caine and Drake have gotten into the Power Plant and are going to feed uranium to a monster? It's Sam's job to stop them!
- In the short story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer", the main character befriends a 20,000 year old man who says he has survived by always staying on the fringes and never volunteering for anything.
- Hush, Hush:
- In the first book, a particularly creepy instance happens when Patch and Nora have to take shelter in a motel, while it's raining. Patch sets up for them to get a room which the man behind the desk complies with, all while Nora continuously insists that no she does not want to share a room with him. Patch then ends up attacking Nora in the room and threatens her life. When she says she'll scream if he doesn't let her go, he invokes this trope by saying no one will care if a woman screams in a motel as seedy as this.
- In Crescendo, Scott is able to almost flat-out abduct Nora in the middle of a crowded amusement park simply by telling everyone that she's his girlfriend and they enjoy playing a game in public where he pretends to grab her and she pretends to resist. Everyone buys this and one guy laughs.
- In Stephen King's It, the heroes notice the shockingly high level of this in Derry. It's never explained if it's due to Mind Rape via Eldritch Abomination or just human nature, but Derry frequently ignores several massacres and a ×6 murder rate. It's implied that those who haven't left town are at least on some level aware of all the horrible things that happened and have decided to that they can live with it. This also overlaps with Adults Are Useless so that the kids in town have to deal with the psychotically violent bullies (to say nothing of the monster) on their own. An exaggerated and clearly supernaturally affected version happens in a historical anecdote of "what may have been the queerest mass murder in the entire history of America," where everyone else in a bar inexplicably (even to themselves) just ignores a man chopping up everyone in one table with an axe.
- Legend of the Galactic Heroes enforces the trope In-Universe within the Free Planets Alliance. Despite the terrible state of affairs, no one speaks out against them because those that do get targeted by the Patriotic Knight Corps, a terrorist group backed by pro-war politicians, who continue to denounce them as traitors of the nation. Even Yang, the main character who is completely pro-democratic, supports this as it is the people exercising “the freedom to not get involved.” It becomes central to the moral of the series as people choosing to turn their power over to someone else results in the fall of the Alliance, and Reinhard cleaning up their messes for them, further winning over the populace.
- Discussed in Les Misérables. A runaway cart, loaded with pottery, runs down the street and pins down a random pedestrian. Nobody moves to help— they stare, sure, but they're convinced there's nothing they can do. Then, when the Mayor manages to lift the cart a fraction, everyone rushes to help him, because they've realized saving the man's life is possible.
- The former Trope Namer is Life, the Universe and Everything. We're introduced to the concept of the Somebody Else's Problem Field, a sort of stealth system that automatically triggers the Weirdness Censor of anyone who looks directly at it. When it first crops up in the book, Ford tries looking at it from odd angles to get through. Meanwhile, Arthur just calmly remarks that he can see through it (which, obviously, means that it's his problem).
- In The Lorax, the Once-ler says "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." It's particularly effective because this is spoken to a child, implying that kids must care about the future if they want to keep the world from being devastated.
- In Terry Pratchett's Making Money Moist von Lipwig notes that people pay more attention to small noises than big ones, because while small noises are immediate and threatening, loud noises are 'everyone's problem, and therefore, not mine'.
- In Matilda, the rest of the title character's family are so wrapped up in their own lives that they see Matilda as a nuisance and a fool, when in fact she is very intelligent and a genius, which they never commend her for. When, after her first day of school, her teacher, Miss Honey, comes to her parents' home to tell them how smart she really is, her father naturally assumes (falsely) that the reason her teacher is there is because she got in trouble at school already and flatly tells her that they want nothing more to do with Matilda, that she is Miss Honey's problem from now on.
- Neverwhere:
- Richard Mayhew's refusal to yield to this trope, when he found Door bleeding on the sidewalk, led him into London Below. His fiancee declared it someone else's problem, and so remained in London Above.
- Residents of London Below tend not to be noticed by the Above folks in the first place. Later in the book, his fiance recognizes him for a brief moment, then is unable to even -see- him.
- Adam Appich from The Overstory is a cognitive psychologist who devotes his career to studying this, not that this stops him from having his own moments like when his professor has a heart attack and he assumes it's All Part of the Show.
- The Rising of the Shield Hero: When Motoyasu hears that Raphtalia is Naofumi's slave, he immediately challenges him to a duel for her freedom, ignoring her protests that she's at Naofumi's side by choice, slave or not. When the kingdom forces Naofumi to participate by gagging and tying up Raphtalia, and Motoyasu only wins via Malty's illegal interference, they remove the slave crest from her only for Raphtalia to slap Motoyasu and call him out on his behavior. Motoyasu tries to argue that slavery is evil and Naofumi is evil for owning a slave, only for Raphtalia to counter that Naofumi was the one who really saved her from a life as a slave and has done far more to help her than he has by treating her illness, feeding her healthy food, and training her to fight, and asks Motoyasu if he's capable of the same kindness. Motoyasu weakly claims that he would, only for Raphtalia to retort that he would have a rescued slave speaking on his behalf rather than a sycophantic princess if that were true.
- Discussed and Defied in "Singleton" by Greg Egan. The formative experience in the protagonist's life is when he happens upon a crowd of thirty people who are watching two men methodically beat someone to death, none of them willing to do more than call the police, and realizes that he too could get away with doing absolutely nothing to help. Instead, he rushes in, spurring the bystanders to... not help, but at least get close enough to scare the assailants off.
- Noted in the famous poem "Solitude" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which is famous for its opening lines: "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone". Effectively, the poem's message is this trope; people will willingly share joy and happiness, but will seldom listen to your troubles.
- Invoked in Time Out of Time on Electra. She can only witness events as they happen, but must never interfere. If she does, she has to return to her constellation and stay there. She untimately DOES interfere at the end of "The Telling Stone" by tripping Mr. McMorn to save Timothy.
- The vampires at the center of The Twilight Saga. On its own this wouldn't be so bad since it's clearly established that there's another group in place whose job it is to police the vampire population. But on the other hand we have the author saying that the Cullens are a lot like superheroes and the narrative telling us they're "committed to protecting human life," while again and again we only see them reacting to danger when they themselves or someone they have a personal interest in is imperiled.
- In Worm 11.5 Taylor meets a girl who saw her being shoved into a locker full of rotting garbage by her bullies but didn't do anything to help. She promptly gives the other a big chewing-out.
