Bystander Effect Essay

If I was doing this study, my hypothesis would be that “people, who receive an aversive stimulus every time they give an incorrect answer, will try harder to get the correct answer than those who do not receive anything”. My independent variables, which are the variables that researcher manipulates, would be the electric shocks and the emotional motivation; and my dependent variable, which is the variable that is tested and measured, would be the members’ results.

Psychologists exploded. Many reasons, many hypotheses were given for why this happened. Some claimed the witnesses were too shocked or numb to react. Some claimed that content seen in video games and movies had such an effect on the witnesses that they were unable to separate real life from the television screen (Slater 96). Two young psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane, weren’t sastified with these hypotheses; this is not to say that the others were wrong, more that these two men believed less in the power in personality than they did in the power of situation. So they conducted an experiment, where they recruited NYU students to take part in a fake study of student adaption to urban college life. The goal of this experiment was to see how the subject reacted to a situation when someone started to have a seizure. The student was isolated in a room and was only able to communicate with other “students” via a microphone that would only turn on if it was their turn to talk. Recordings of other students and their experiments would play then, making the student believe that there were truly other people in this study. As the experiment went on, and various recordings went on and on, suddenly one of the “students” would begin to have a seizure. The student was given a full six minutes to react to the situation.

People have a tendency, known as social proof, to believe that others' interpretation of the ambiguous situation is more accurate than their own. Hence, a lack of response by others leads them to conclude that the situation is not an emergency and that response is not warranted. Finally, empirical evidence has shown that the bystander effect is negated when the situation is clearly recognized as an emergency. In a 1976 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Lance Shotland and Margaret Straw illustrated that when people witnessed a fight between a man and a woman that they believed to be strangers to each other, they intervened 65 percent of the time. Thus, people often do not respond appropriately to an emergency situation because the situation is unclear to them and as a result, they have misinterpreted it as a non-emergency based on their own past experience or social cues taken from others.

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

1. After the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, John Darley and Bibb Latane were in shock as the rest of the city/world that a 28 year old lady could be stabbed in a neighborhood with about 38 by standers or more and say or do nothing. Why didn’t anyone try and help her? How could people stand by and watch this go on? People speculated that the failure of people to get involved might be due more to the influence (socially) that bystanders have on each other. To test this theory, Darley and Latane, two psychologists, decided to conduct a study. “Diffusion of Responsibility” Everyone hopes that someone else will be the first to step up

In most cases, scholars view research as large samples of subjects that are either participating in either two groups. Most research studies are considered as an experimental group whereby a treatment, independent variable (IV), or intervention is presented or a control group in which such interventions are not presented (Alberto & Troutman, 2016). Based on case study level C, Case 2, the independent variable is the treatment that is needed to change Rachel’s attitude in class. In the group designs, there is involvement of many subjects with each having an averaged performance, Dependent Variable which is comparable in the evaluation of experimental control. Therefore, Dependent variable in Rachel’s case is her behavior.

Social psychology first examined the phenomena later termed “bystander effect” in response to a 1964 murder. The murder of a young woman with as many as 38 witnesses and none who helped until it was too late. The bystander effect is individuals seeing an emergency situation but not helping. There are many reasons why individuals do not respond: diffusion of responsibility, not noticing or unsure if it is an emergency, and not wanting to be liable if the person still dies are a few.

Picture this. Someone is on their daily 3.5km run and as they pass the bus stop a woman grabs her chest and collapses. There are crowds of people passing by her but no one’s stopping to help. They probably aren't going to stop and help, because no one is stopping they are going to think if those many people aren’t stopping to help then she is fine, they might also be thinking someone else will help her. Now picture this that same person is out just for a walk around the park and they hear someone cry out for help, no one’s around but them so they probably would go over and help them. These situations are representing the bystander effect. John Darley and Bibb Latane came up with the bystander effect, the bystander effect states that the more people that are present the less likely anyone is to help someone in need. The bystander effect can be connected to the characters in William Golding's Lord of the flies. People just stand by in emergency situations when other people are around, and them no helping the victim can have some serious consequences.

A researcher has designed a study to test the effects of different types of individual psycho-therapy on people's levels of anxiety. She has randomly placed people into one of three groups: a behavioral treatment group, a psycho-dynamic treatment group, or a no-treatment control group. She then measures people's level of anxiety after the treatment.

First ‘The Bystander Effect’, states ‘that individuals are less likely to intervene in emergency situations when other people are present’. Latne & Darley, (1970) cited in Byford J.( 2014 pp 232). Simply put, where emergency situations arise, if more than one person is present the likelihood of someone in distress being helped reduces. This is the ‘diffusion of responsibility’ effect were each bystander feels less obliged to help because the responsibility seems to be divided with others present’. (Byford J., 2014 pp233) An example of Bystander Apathy shown within a video (The Open University 2016).

Whether it’s through sexual assault, stalking, physical or psychological means, maltreatment in relationships among college students has become a serious problem on college and university campuses. Most of these assaults have been either committed by someone the victim knew or an intimate partner. In the past, student victims who have attempt to deal with the effects of intimate partner violence (IPV) such as depression, low self-esteem, anxiety disorders, physical injuries or the assault itself, are often times faced with the unique challenges of finding resources or programs that might be able to assist them. However, in recent years, college and university campuses have implemented several sexual assault programs and procedures aimed at

They depict an experiment where a woman leaves the room and goes into an area where she can not be seen, but she can be heard. She then feigns an injury to provoke a response. [The experiments results were twenty-six individuals waited alone reacted to an accident seventy percent of the time.] Then they reenacted the same accident with individuals in a group, and only twenty-percent offered the person in distress their assistance (Darley and Latane 770). After the experiment, the individuals that did not respond said that they did not want to embarrass her because they thought that it was just a minor injury.

People uneducated about Epilepsy may have confused thoughts on what it really is. People have these "notions," which are partly or entirely not true. So, throughout this research paper, these notions will be proven untrue, mostly by factual information given by

Today a lot of individuals are praised for their bravery and their heroism. A lot of

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