Bystander Summary

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.

However, this is not true at all, and readers discover this when reading the book.

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.

When there is an emergency, why is taking out our phones to take a picture or video the very first thing we want to do? Why do we casually walk by a person who is in trouble, and go about our business as if we did not anyone? Why do we not help or act when someone is getting, but instead we just stand in a crowd and watch? Why do we bury our moral instincts during emergencies? “We witness a problem, consider positive action, and respond by doing nothing. Why do we not help in these situations and put our moral instincts in shackles” (Keltner & Marsh, 2017). We as people are bystanders to the world around us daily, but the question is why? The answer to all the “why” questions is the bystander effect.

In the book “Bystander by James Preller the main character Eric is a thirteen year old 7th grade boy who faces difficulties that change him as a person and how he views things. Eric’s parents get divorced causing his little brother Rudy, his mom and himself to move to Long Island from Ohio. Eric’s mom then enrolls Eric into a new school in which he does not fit into and he when he eventually fits in he finds the wrong friends.

Soon after, Eric has his first encounter with Griffin and his friends.  Griffin is a seventh grader who will be going to school with Eric, and he is a leader of other boys. They ask Eric if he had seen a kid run by the court. Eric responds no, even though he had seen someone. Griffin proceeds to question Eric, but he still denies it.

In the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, twenty-eight year old barmaid Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was murdered and raped on the street in Kew Gardens, New York. The incident did not initially receive much attention until Martin Gansberg's infamous article, "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder, Didn't Call the Police", was published in the New York Times two weeks later. In reality, only twelve people witnessed the event yet each did nothing to significantly help Genovese until it was too late. The Genovese murder has become the definitive example of the "bystander effect", the social phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to help someone in distress if there are other people present. The bystander effect occurs wherever there is

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

Truth be told, this is my second reading of the book. I picked this book as an independent reading book for an assignment I had to do my senior year of high school. I expected

the characters in the novel are based on real people. The main characters involved in this book

In the 2007 article “the bystander effect” the author Dorothy Barkin’s was talking about the reasons why most people decide not to get involved in complex situations. Many think that the reasons maybe very obvious such as the fear of possible danger to one’s self or having to go through long legal proceedings. However, the author talks about two main reasons for such actions. The first being ambiguity, the fact the most people do not know how to evaluate different situations and there lays most for the decision making. As knowing what the problem that you are facing in that moment, that alone creates a high-pressure environment that most people would not like to be involved in. Not to mention, being able to help effectively

While the book is obviously fiction, the author makes it seem very realistic by tying in math and science throughout the book. The author will go through

Already I can tell that this book is more difficult than most other novels I have read. It seems as though Roth is in favor of using long sentences and complex vocabulary. I sometimes had to reread sentences a few times because there was difficult vocabulary I needed to look up and the sentences were long. I needed to read each sentence piece by piece to make sure I could understand what the author wanted to convey to the reader. Although the text seemed overwhelming when I read the first few pages; once I began reading sentences in increments I could more easily understand the text.

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

One reason why I gave this book a “B” grade is because there are a lot of characters and I found it a little hard to follow. Throughout the