As Sunday's Bondi Beach attack unfolded, many will have seen footage of a man acting alone, moving toward one of the gunmen and wrestling the weapon from his hands.

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It was an extraordinary act of bravery that resulted in him being shot twice.

The man was named as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, a local fruit shop owner.

We have no way of knowing how many additional lives were saved as a result of Ahmed's bravery. But it almost certainly prevented further loss of life.

The moment is reminiscent of when a bystander similarly intervened at great personal risk during the Bondi Junction shopping centre attack in 2024.

When acts of courage like these occur, we rightly take notice and commend them.

But they also raise important and often overlooked questions: what motivates ordinary people to take such selfless, high-risk actions, is bystander intervention a good strategy, or does it go against official advice during mass violence events?

Many people would have heard of the "bystander effect", which occurs when the presence of others discourages someone from intervening in an emergency situation, against a bully, or during an assault or other crime.

But decades of behavioural research complicate the popular idea that people inevitably freeze or look away when others are present during dangerous situations.

A large meta-analysis of bystander behaviour shows in genuinely dangerous, unambiguous emergencies (like those involving a clear perpetrator), the........

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