Classic Study in Social Psychology Essay example

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 movie I chose was Easy A because there are many psychological concepts this movie that relate to real-life events and it covers many theories we learned about in this class. Easy A was released in 2010 and directed by Will Gluck. It’s about a teenage girl named Olive who accidentally admits to her friend Rhi that she was having sexual relations with boys. She felt pressured into lying since her friend had already engaged in sexual acts with her boyfriend. A rumor then spread and many people in the school then ignored Olive because they thought what she did was an immoral act, but the guys started giving her more attention. I feel that this applies to many

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.

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.

In the article Gansberg said there were three attacked but there were two and in fact two people called the police. Once the ambulance arrived, Kitty was in the arms of a neighbor and friend Sophia Farrar. Farrar left her apartment to be with Kitty’s side with no idea whether it was safe or not. Lemman’s article did not serve to just criticize Gansberg but also added key details of the murder and witnesses like Joseph Fink and Karl Ross. Fink who worked in the apartment building across from Kitty saw the first attack and after watching Moseley flee, took a nap. Ross who was a friend and neighbor of Kitty’s was drunk that night. He heard the first attack did not help but opened his door a crack during the second attack and saw Moseley stab Kitty. Ross than made a few phone calls one to a friend who told him to stay out of it and then crawled across the roof into a friend’s apartment where he later called the police. The Kitty Genovese case helped to push the creation of 911, in 1964 to call the police in New York you had to use a specific number of each precinct, and your call was not always answered. Kitty’s case also sparked psychologist Bibb Latane and John Darley to create a new realm of research called the bystander

Read the article Diagnosis Coding and Medical Necessity: Rules and Reimbursement by Janis Cogley located on the AHIMA Body of Knowledge (BOK) at http://www.ahima.org.

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).

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

“Why People Don’t Help in a Crisis” co-written by John M. Darley and Bibb Latané states that there are three primary reasons to a bystander’s unresponsive behavior. In the event of an emergency a person must first take notice of the situation. Then interpret if the scene is truly an emergency and ultimately determine if one has a personal responsibility to help. Darley and Bibb conclude that someone’s reactions are manipulated by how other people around respond to the situation.

You’re on your way home when the screaming starts. You look up, trying to identify the source of the noise. Out of the corner of your eye you see a young woman running across a nearby parking lot, pursued by a young man of around 30. He catches up with her as she reaches her apartment building, and draws a knife, stabbing her twice in the back. She screams for help, and despite at least 38 witnesses passing by, none comes. The woman is left to die. That is the story of 29 year old Kitty Genovese, murdered March 13, 1964, Queens, New York.

They assured us, they would be among the first to help [in a real emergency]” (Darley and Latane 770). Then Darley and Latane explained why bystanders act the way they do, with their final example. [It involved an individual in a room and a tape recorder playing simulating an individual having major speech difficulties. More individuals, that thought they were alone, came out to help the person having difficulties (the tape recorder). Every time the individual listening to the tape recorder thought that there were more people with them, they were less likely to respond.]

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

The purpose of this experiment is to understand the Bystander theory. This experiment tested to see if one’s emotions, such as personal distress and empathy, could interfere with one’s ability to act during an emergency situation. Participants were randomly assigned a condition of empathetic emotion or personal distress, and told to read a scenario. Once the participants had finished reading the scenarios, they were given eight scale questions regarding different options of what they were willing to do in the scenarios. The results of the experiment showed there was no significance difference between the conditions and their ability to act.

The bystander effect is a concept that concludes that when the number of bystanders is increased in an emergency situation, the less likely any of the bystanders will assist the victim. Kitty Genovese was murdered in front of her New York apartment and about 38 residents witnessed yet decided not to assist by calling police, or trying to stop her attacker. Kitty’s death, sparked a concern for many people and got social psychologists to question if it is in the human nature to not help those in need, it also led to the findings of other elements that are related to the reasons why the bystander effect occurs in large groups compared to when someone witnesses an accident by themselves. One of the main reasons why the bystander effect occurs

What judgments do we make about others? Everyday we make judgments in our social interactions about why others act the way they do, which is known as