Purpose Virus epidemics may be mitigated if people comply with directives to stay at home and keep their distance from strangers in public. As such, there is a public health interest in social distancing compliance. The available evidence on distancing practices in public space is limited, however, by the lack of observational data. Here, we apply video observation as a method to examine to what extent members of the public comply with social distancing directives. Data Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage of interactions in public was collected in inner-city Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From the footage, we observed instances of people violating the 1.5-meter distance directives in the weeks before, during, and after these directives were introduced to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Results We find that people complied with the 1.5-meter distance directives when these directives were first introduced, but that the level of compliance started to decline soon after. We also find that violation of the 1.5-meter distance directives is strongly associated with the number of people observed on the street and with non-compliance to stay-at-home directives, operationalized with large-scale aggregated location data from cell phones. All three measures correlate to a varying extent with temporal patterns in the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, temperature, COVID-19 related Google search queries, and media attention to the topic. Conclusion Compliance with 1.5 meter distance directives is short-lived and coincides with the number of people on the street and with compliance to stay-at-home directives. Potential implications of these findings are that keep- distance directives may work best in combination with stay-at-home directives and place-specific crowd-control strategies, and that the number of people on the street and community-wide mobility as captured with cell phone data offer easily measurable proxies for the extent to which people keep sufficient physical distance from others at specific times and locations.

Half a century of research on bystander behavior concludes that individuals are less likely to intervene during an emergency when in the presence of others than when alone. By contrast, little is known regarding the aggregated likelihood that at least someone present at an emergency will do something to help. The importance of establishing this aggregated intervention baseline is not only of scholarly interest but is also the most pressing question for actual public victims-will I receive help if needed? The current article describes the largest systematic study of real-life bystander intervention in actual public conflicts captured by surveillance cameras. Using a unique cross-national video dataset from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and South Africa (N = 219), we show that in 9 of 10 public conflicts, at least 1 bystander, but typically several, will do something to help. We record similar likelihoods of intervention across the 3 national contexts, which differ greatly in levels of perceived public safety. Finally, we find that increased bystander presence is related to a greater likelihood that someone will intervene. Taken together these findings allay the widespread fear that bystanders rarely intervene to help. We argue that it is time for psychology to change the narrative away from an absence of help and toward a new understanding of what makes intervention successful or unsuccessful.

Night-time economy (NTE) leisure zones, while providing local economic growth and positive social experiences, are hotspots for urban public violence. Research aimed at better understanding and thus reducing this violence has employed a range of empirical methods: official records, self-reports, experiments, and observational techniques. In this paper, we review the applications of these methodologies for analyzing NTE violence on key research dimensions, including mapping incidents across time and space; interpreting the motivations and meaning of violence; identifying social psychological background variables and health consequences; and the ability to examine mid-violent interactions. Further, we assess each method in terms of reliability, validity, and the potential for establishing causal claims. We demonstrate that there are fewer and less established methodologies available for examining the interactional dynamics of NTE violence. Using real-life NTE bystander intervention as a case example, we argue that video-based behavioral analysis is a promising method to address this gap. Given the infancy and relative lack of exposure of the video observational method, we provide recommendations for scholars interested in adopting this technique.