Groupthink or the Bystander Effect?

Groupthink Allows Store Trampling Death

This brief video from cnn.com (1:18 in length) discusses how Groupthink allowed a Wal-Mart employee to be trampled by customers as the store opened at 5am this past Friday, known as "Black Friday" (the day after Thanksgiving where stores traditionally get into "the black," or start turning a profit for the year).

The video is actually pretty short and not all that informative, but my first reaction was that this incident was not caused by groupthink, but by what's known as the "bystander effect." Wikipedia defines the bystander effect as "a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders." In contrast, we defined groupthink in class as a situation where the group, collectively, is dumber than the individual for a number of reasons (insulation from outside sources, fear of challenging assumptions, etc.)

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the bystander effect in his book "Blink" in relation to the famous case of Kitty Genovese, where a woman in New York was attacked and murdered while 38 of her neighbors apparently heard her screams and did nothing.

This article describes the whole story of what happened at the Wal-Mart. An amazing quote:

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

Anyway, my point is that I think the use of groupthink here is a little off-base. Perhaps there is some overlap between groupthink and the bystander effect, but here, it wasn't that the crowd was dumb as a result of the fact that they were in a crowd. The crowd was dumb because they either a.) didn't realize someone had been trampled to death, or b.) assumed someone else would take care of it, and they could go on their merry way and continue shopping. I'd be curious to hear what other people thought of this.