Bystander Effect Research Paper

Also known as ‘bystander apathy’, the bystander effect is the idea that a victim is more likely to receive help if there is just one bystander to witness the situation, rather than if there was a group of bystanders.

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).

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.

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 defined as the higher the number of people who notice an emergency, the less of a chance that those bystanders will help the victim (as cited in Aronson, Wilson, Akert, & Sommers, 2015). The importance of the bystander effect is unparalleled because it determines whether humans will still help in a situation when there are other people available. Bystanders can deal with situations ranging from the mundane to the dire, but what matters is the number of those who take action.

In the experiment they tested the responsiveness of individuals and how they reacted under stress when first, alone, and then second within a crowd. Each time the people that were under pressure and alone reacted in a higher rate than those in the crowds. Researchers have justified people’s non responsiveness within a crowd, with diffusion of responsibility, in which people are less likely to take action within a crowd, because they feel someone else will take responsibility. On March 14 1964, Kitty Genovese was the ultimate test subject for the Bystander Syndrome, having been stabbed twice in public and left to die on her apartment stairs, but the question that remains unanswered, under matters of a life, is the silence of the crowd truly due to diffusion of responsibility? Or lack of interest and

The Bystander-Effect has a major impact on these types of situations. The Bystander-Effect is a theory that in an emergency, people don’t get involved due to various reasons. For instance, people don’t get involved because

Nonetheless, the bystander effect does not apply to everybody without exception. There are still some people who will sincerely try their best to help others, like Hugo Tale-Yax who actually was trying a help a woman under assault when the attacker killed him (Litch 651). I believe as long as one person try their best to help, so will others. In the end, try our best to help is better than do nothing but only the help from other

Why the witnesses demonstrated a lack of reaction towards the victim's need for help? In 1968, two Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley came up with a concept called “The Bystander Effect”, which supposed “the presence of diffusion of responsibility” and “social influence”.

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.

this brutal murder and not one of them informed the police? The bystander effect states that, in

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

Just because someone cannot recognize the faces they see on the street or identify the names of all their neighbors in an urban environment does not mean they are lonely. It does not mean that the urban environment as a whole is impersonal. Everyday interactions occurring in the public sphere may seem impersonal at a glance, but people’s lives are not wholly defined by their public lives. Even in the urban environment, people generally have enriching personal relationships. As stated in the textbook, there are many ways people can form bonds with one another. Even in the city, people bond over “kinship, occupation, lifestyle,” recreational activities and “other personal attributes” (142). These relationships are not geographically bound. People with similar interests may come together from all over the city and stay in touch through alternate modes of

Studies show that diffusion of responsibility accounts for results in bystander hypothesis studies. As Baron et al. explain, the bystander effect occurs when the number of persons willing to help decreases with the number of people present. Darley and Latane (1968) assert that in the presence of others, bystanders reduce the individual feelings of personal responsibility and lower the speed of reporting an incident. Thus, in prosocial situations an individual's willingness to intervene or assist someone in need is inhibited by the presence of other people. The individual is under the belief that other people present will or should intervene, and does not perceive it as his or her responsibility to take action. In addition, diffusion of responsibility