Bystander Behavior: A Sociological Study

‘A Television Drama’, written by Jane Rule, is the story of a woman who lives on the street where a crime takes place. The police, swarmed just outside the woman’s house, were asking witnesses questions and looking for the suspect of a burglary that had occurred a few blocks away. The protagonist, Carolee, is frightened by this and decides to stay inside her home. While inside the house, she walks around aimlessly, glancing outside the windows when she spots an injured man in her garden. She hesitates to call the police and simply observes the man, ultimately deciding against calling 911. Some believe that this was not a morally correct thing to do; however, Carolee was correct in deciding not to phone the police because she thought she might have been imagining the man in her garden, the police were already on the scene

This essay will ‘compare and contrast’ two approaches made in investigating the ‘bystander effect’. It will discuss in some depth as to what exactly is meant by the bystander effect, illustrating when this concept was first shown and why. An outline will be made of the different methods used, those being experiments and discourse analysis, explaining each one in turn, within the framework of two cases. The first being the murder of ‘Catherine Genovese,’ 1964.and the second ‘James Bulger’ 1993. The essay will then show examples of the differences and similarities between each method. Concluding with a summary of findings into the two approaches to investigating the Bystander Effect.

different times) act as if they were is a lot of pain or a drunk. The test was to see how long it took

If you saw someone being attacked on the street, would you help? Many of us would quickly say yes we would help because to state the opposite would say that we are evil human beings. Much research has been done on why people choose to help and why others choose not to. The bystander effect states that the more bystanders present, the less likely it is for someone to help. Sometimes a bystander will assume that because no one else seems concerned, they shouldn't be (Senghas, 2007). Much of the research that has been done supports this definition of the bystander effect. There have also been recent situations where this

The Bystander effect is a controversial theory given to social phenomenon where the more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation for this Bystander Effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. (Kyle et al.) The Bystander effect, also known as the Genovese Syndrome, was created after the infamous murder of “Kitty” Catherine Genovese in 1964, on the streets of New York in front of thirty-seven witnesses. After studying the Genovese syndrome and doing research on how this phenomenon occurs today, it is clear The Bystander effect is not theory, but actually fact.

The bystander effect, is a “social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present”(Weiten). Such reactions usually occur when individuals do not want to risk getting involved in the situation. In Chronicles of a Death Foretold, even though the townspeople do not desire the murder of Santiago Nasar,their unwillingness or lack of courage to take action in preventing this “foretold murder” consequently allows for the murder to happen. The idea of disturbing the status-quo and risk of involvement overshadows the Sucré citizens’ moral values. Even though a scale of individual willingness to avert the crime is presented such as Colonel Lazaro Aponte’s fulfilling his duty ,Clotilde Armenta’s multiple attempts and Father Armando’s total indifference; none of the townspeople want to be directly implicated in the matter.

Darley and Latane begin their essay by using solid examples of when the bystander effect presented itself, and why people were harmed because of it. They explain why nice people do not help in certain situations, and why someone can pass by a person in distress when others are around, and why more people respond when no one is around. Darley and Latane show what it takes for people to respond; they have to actually realize that it is an emergency and not a ruse or a normal occurrence. Sitting idly by while a dangerous situation is happening does not make someone a bad person, it just reveals their humanity.

They used the case of murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 as a case study to investigate why people refused to offer help and intervene the incident. Scholars proposed that the failure to lend a helping hand to victims is due to diffusion of responsibility. Diffusion of responsibility proposed that when there is more than one person appears in the situation, who have the ability to help, people tend to expect that someone in the situation will or should lend a helping hand. In the case of Genovese, since the murder happened in a neighbourhood, 38 witnesses were actually awake and noticed something was going wrong outside. However, no one offered direct help to Genovese.

The by stander effect is a term that came to fruition when Kitty Genovese was brutally raped and murdered in front of her apartment, and 38 individuals witnessed the entire tragedy and turned a blind eye. Researchers were interested in this phenomenon and set out to research the bystander effect further. The bystander effect occurs when an individual’s likeliness of helping decreases when in the presence of others in an emergency situation (Fischer, Krueger, Greitmeyer, Vogrincic, Kastenmuller, & Frey, 2011). The purpose of this study is to measure the level of helpfulness among college age students with emphasis on the bystander effect. The model that this study follows is the Bystander Intervention Model by Latane and Darley. A series of five steps must be followed while intervening in the case of an emergency, the stages are again as follows: (1) noticing the event, (2) interpreting the event as an emergency, (3) making the choice to intervene, (4) knowing how to provide help, and (5) applying the behavior (Jenkins & Nickerson, 2016). As a group, we set out to analyze the bystander effect among college age students, while focusing on how gender impacts the given scenario.

The bystander effect is both a social and psychological phenomenon in which an individual’s inclination towards showing helping behaviours are minimised by the influence of other people. Research has found that the more people acting as bystanders in a situation, the less likely it is that helping behaviours will be demonstrated. However in the correct conditions, where conditioned cues increase self-awareness, it is possible to reverse the bystander effect phenomenon. The bystander effect is prevalent in everyday life, and often decorates the news, shocking the world, especially when authority figures such as police men and women succumb to the effect. Diffusion of responsibility, ignorance of others interpretation of an event and self-consciousness are all social processes which appear to lead to social inhibition of helping behaviours and one of the main theories of the bystander effect is provided Latané and Darley (1970) whose cognitive model provides a series of decisions that can lead to social inhibition. The bystander effect is influenced by the conditions an individual is in when an event occurs, for example the bystander effect appears to be most dominant when an individual is in a group of strangers with low group cohesiveness. FINISH

Introduction: The bystander effect is a normal occurrence that happens when the presence of others decreases an individual’s probability to intervene in an emergency situation. There are many reasons to why the bystander effect occurs, the main reason being the fact that the individual’s sense of responsibility is reduced when there are other people witnessing the situation. Culture plays a significant role in determining if a bystander will or will not aid during certain situations. Western countries such as Australia, United States, Germany and Ireland are all known to have an individualist culture, where people are seen as

Everyone has experienced witnessing another person in danger or has been in a harmful circumstance with a witness present. Thousands of people each day are faced with this dilemma, whether it be small scale, such as bullying, or large scale, such as murder. Psychology Dictionary defines the bystander effect as “a tendency for people not to get involved or not to offer help in a social situation”. Examples include school children standing around timidly as they watch their fellow classmate receive taunts from the school bully, or neighbors keeping quiet as they witness a young girl being brutally murdered. As citizens and as human beings, bystanders have the moral obligation to intervene in a crisis. Although people have

On Friday 13 March in 1964, 28-year-old Catherine Genovese was arriving home in her built-up neighborhood from a late night shift as a bar manager in Queens, New York. She was suddenly attacked with a knife by a man named Winston Moseley. She screamed aloud “Oh my God, I 've been stabbed! Please help me!” We know what she screamed because people heard her. People who didn 't lift a finger to help. People who didn 't want to 'get involved ', who didn 't call the police.

PART 2 ESSAY This essay will compare and contrast the two approaches to investigating the ‘bystander effect’. It will first discuss in some depth as to what exactly is meant by the bystander effect, giving some examples of this and then go on to illustrate when this concept was first shown and why. An outline will then be made showing the different methods in which social scientists have investigated this explaining the different methods used. The essay will then show examples of the differences and similarities used in both methods.

On March 13, 1964, a poor bar manager Kitty Genovese was stabbed outside her apartment. The most shocking thing in this case is, during the murder, all the 38 witnesses did not take any measures to help her (Dowd, B04). The reasons why the bystanders behaved indifferently can be explained by a strange phenomenon called the bystander effect in social psychology. The manifestation of this effect is that people are unlikely to help those who are in need if others are on the spots. And what is weirder, is that the more bystanders, the less chance for them to offer their help. This phenomenon is possibly caused by the following four main factors, bystanders’ general characteristics, evaluation from both other bystanders and society, as well as two