Bystander Behavior

Everyday humans are presented with new opportunities and situations. These events can change the way they think and make decisions. But it's the way it can change ones relationships that can really hurt one's ability to care. There is a total of 7.442 billion people alive today. Yet only a small portion of that are people one truly cares about. For many people, a specific setting, situation or emotion can alter the way people can think rationally.

Why should students help pick up fellow classmate's books that he or she dropped? Why should people give to the homeless? Why should humans become organ donors? Altruism is defined as a person's ability to go out of their way to enhance the welfare of someone else without anything in return. But it's not the "what" of altruism that is intriguing, it's the "why" that is truly fascinating. Scientist and researches may never pinpoint what makes humans exhibit altruistic behavior, but there is one thing that scientist and researches are sure about. Altruism plays an important role in running society, and the world can use more of it.

In the book Bystander, Eric, the protagonist, was a bystander, who noticed about bullying but, never did anything about it. Eric learned to take action for what is right to prevent from bullying and not be a bystander. As Eric realized that he was a bystander, he learned to stand up and confront the bullies.

The bystander effect is a social psychological scenario where a person who is in an urgent situation is not given any help by the people around due to the discourage from the presence of others (whatispsychology.biz, 2017). Social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane, introduced the bystander effect in the 1960s after the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was stabbed to death outside her home in New York City. It took her attacker more than half an hour to kill her, and during that time, thirty-eight people saw her being murdered, and they did nothing to help her. “The responsibility for helping was diffused among the observers” (Darley & Latane, 1968).

In the essay “Thirty-Eight who saw Murder didn’t call the Police”, Martin Gansberg describes how selfish and inconsiderable some people can be. He claims that society should be more involved in taking action when seeing violent or life threatening events occurring in their communities.

‘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

The bystander effect also arises from a diffusion of responsibility as each bystander can better rationalize his or her lack of action. In some cases, people assume that in a large group, there will be someone else that is more qualified to help and therefore, each person feels less obligated to act. For example, a doctor is far more qualified to provide medical assistance to a victim and likewise, a police officer or stronger-bodied man can better subdue a perpetrator. If the crowd of bystanders is large,

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 study by Darley and Latane leaves society with the knowledge that everyone who is witnessing an emergency is most likely thinking the same thing “someone else will call for help or has already” so “Always act as if you are the only person there” (Darely & Latane, 1968). The concept of situationism is the driving force behind bystander effect. Situationism is “social behavior is, to a larger extent than people commonly realize, a response to people’s social context, not a function of individual personality” (Fiske, 2010, p. 7). Individuals first have to decide if they are witnessing an emergency. Then they need to decide if they have a responsibility to act which is when situationism comes in. If there are hundreds of witnesses each individual see the situation from a different perspective and responsibility to act is diffused among the crowd. On the other hand if one individual sees an emergency and believes there is no one else to help the responsibility rests on him or her. The context of the situation will determine how an individual will react, but people should consider the reality of everyone believing someone else will react and no one reacting. Kitty Genovese would still be alive if even one person would have called the cops when the first attack started.

Particularly due to the age of the killers, the ferociousness of the crime and the age of the victim, the mass media reports allowed the public to get personally and emotionally involved in the case and have severe anger and resentment towards the children who murdered James Bulger. The public outcry was huge and, the decision by the politicians and press

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

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.

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

Our goal in this paper is to put a focus neither on the victim, nor the perpetrator, but on the bystander. More precisely we are interested in the active bystander that witnesses