“GOOD EVENING, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am delighted to welcome tonight’s guest speaker, Mr Donny Firkenstein, who has kindly come all the way from Pinner. Donny, the floor is yours.”

I do a lot of public speaking and only very occasionally does it turn into a complete fiasco. There was the time, for instance, that I travelled all the way to Norwich and found that apart from the host there was only one person in the audience. After I had spluttered my way through a few perfunctory remarks, the lone spectator replied that he would love to help my cause but he was worried about violating the terms of his parole.

Then there was the time I was invited to give a 45-minute lecture on a complex topic. I prepared carefully and realised only as the chairman was introducing me that I had completely misunderstood what it was they wanted me to talk about. Of course, if your talk goes reasonably well there are always questions. What, for instance, was I supposed to reply to the man who asked me “Which do you find harder — being a Tory or being a Jew?” Mostly, however, I just get silence. Polite applause. “The speaker has consented to take a few questions” and then silence. I’d be worried about it, except that it’s not just me.

At the end of almost every talk when the audience is given an opportunity to quiz the speaker there are no volunteers. Then one person, often prodded into action by the chairman, plucks up the courage to pose a question. After that everyone piles in. There are usually disappointed people with their hands up when the meeting is drawn to a close.

We’re so used to this because it happens all the time. But when you come to think of it, it’s a little odd, isn’t it? I have been thinking about it. The reason? That woman found last week lying unconscious in a busy main road.

Perhaps you saw the pictures. CCTV footage played on the television news last week showed a 25-year-old woman, bleeding from a serious head wound and sprawled in the gutter. Equally shocking, they showed more than a dozen cars simply driving by, some swerving to avoid the body.

“Perhaps it is a reflection of modern society,” said the police. A spokesman for Victim Support agreed. It was “a sad sign of today’s society,” she said, adding that “this was in a busy street in the middle of the day”. Newspaper commentators were not far behind. The Western Daily Press was typical, noting that “over the last few decades there has been increased individualisation and privatisation of our lives. . . We increasingly see ourselves as all-important individuals rather than as part of a corporate whole.”

This analysis is perfectly understandable. It just happens to be the exact opposite of the truth.

Let’s deal first with the argument that this incident is a sign of “today’s society”. When I first saw the pictures they rang a faint bell and then I remembered — Catherine Genovese.

It is more than 40 years ago that Ms Genovese was stabbed to death in the borough of Queens, New York. The case became famous. The police investigation revealed that the victim had been chased through the streets screaming for more than half an hour. There had been 38 witnesses watching from the safety of their apartments and not one of them even called the police. Every newspaper took up the story and bemoaned the “cold society” we had become. Books appeared, a television documentary, a play.

So what happened last week was not new. But is it, nevertheless, a symbol of how we now see ourselves as individuals rather than the corporate whole? The interest in the Genovese case was such that it prompted two New York psychologists, Bibb Latané and John Darley, to investigate why it had happened. The pair staged a number of emergency incidents and on 85 per cent of the occasions when a single bystander was present they stopped to help. But this happened only 31 per cent of the time when there were five bystanders.

This finding has been repeated over and over again in other research. What it shows is that last week’s analysis is dead wrong. As individuals we are caring and want to help, but when we are part of a corporate whole we don’t do so.

When we are part of a corporate whole, we take our cues from everyone else. We are not quite sure what is going on and what exactly our responsibility is. We wait for someone else to act and then follow.