History Of The Bystander Effect

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.

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.

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.

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 Chapter “In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing,” from the book Opening Skinner’s Box, by Lauren Slater. Slater describes a crime scene in which the witnesses didn’t do anything to help a woman that was being stabbed, she also tells us about a few experiments that were conducted in regards to how people would react when help is needed in certain situations, will they report the situation to anyone or just go about their business like nothing is going on. Calling for help or assisting someone in a time of need isn’t always something that people do as an immediate reaction, especially when there’s a crowd of people present.

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

Most just stared and asked if the experimenter was ok but did not have an urge to help him out. A similar situation happened in New York City, when Kitty Genovese was struck down right outside her apartment. She was repeatedly stabbed by Winston Moseley under the eyes of 37 people, no one stood up to help, they just simply stared from the safety of their apartments. They chose to ignore the tragedy because it does not have an emotional affect or physical affect on them. In other words, they are not connected to the victim whatsoever so they feel less responsible and thus, some might even questioned themselves during the tragedy of why should they even help when others does not? However, according to a study research, gender also plays a role.

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.

As shown in Fischer et al.(2011) bystanders will more likely to provide help, when they are with the people familiar with rather that strangers, because the partners can give supportive to each other in order to reduce the negative consequences, regulate negative emotions and also can communicate to increase the decision-making in order cooperate to help the victim. This is applicable for our respondents because almost all of them provide help with the partners accompany them. However, researcher mentioned when bystanders having the conversation among them, there may have bystander effect

Every day, people encounter situations in which automatic thinking assists in decision making. How does automatic thinking cause humans to operate in different situations? In situations that are ambiguous, studies show that the bystander effect is shown to be more probable if these people were in a more controlled situation. The bystander effect shows that in situations in which there are more people present, the likelihood that someone will take action is far less than if one was alone. This is partially due to the belief that responsibility is split when there are more people present during a particular event. One is less likely to act because they expect that someone else will act first. Because everyone that is present in a particular event shares the same knowledge about the situation, they share the thought that someone else will act first, causing the shared responsibility to bounce from person to person as everyone waits for someone else to take action.

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 Bystander Effect is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people are less likely to offer assistance in emergency situations if bystanders, or other individuals, are also present. The murder of a woman, Kitty Genovese, was the catalyst for the discovery of such an effect. Approximately 40 individuals observed or overheard Genovese’s murder, yet no one reported it to authorities or attempted to intervene in any way. This phenomenon was studied and demonstrated by John M. Darley and Bibb Latene, both social psychologists. Darley and Latene showed this effect in several experiments known together as the “Bystander Apathy Experiments.”

I think the word bystander effect means when individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation.the studies show the majority of students are likely to be a bystander when it is related to sexual assault because they might see it as being acceptable or they’re too scared to help or don't want to involve themselves in the situation. Reasons because they don't want to talk to the police or have to have a witness. People film rape and put it in social media because they want everybody to know what's going. Some People would film it because they have phones or they would do it for views.

Imagine seeing a civilian being senselessly beaten and verbally attacked in a public place; would you intervene? Morally, a person 's first instinct should be to jump right in and act as a hero, however, that is not always that action that is executed. The social issue of domestic violence is becoming very prevalent in the world’s society, and has called for a new category of social experiment. While this experiment has variables to its execution, the premise remains the same; put actors in a public place and enact a scene that depicts a victim being domestically abused by their partner, then watch to see if any witnesses will intervene. This new type of experiment that resolves to seek the reactions of regular civilians to domestic abuse in public has been proven necessary to shed the harsh light on the results. These results show the majority of public domestic abuses cases will go unchallenged, which raises a red flag to the safety of our society as a whole. The diversitivity of the environments that the public abuse is taking place in has been shown to affect the mindset and actions of the witnesses. A group in Sweden set out to take on the experiment in an enclosed elevator, and their results vastly differed from a group that did the experiment in a public and well-traveled courtyard. Another variable that comes into play is the gender of the abuser/abused. There is a dramatic change in numbers when a woman abuses a man, versus the man abusing the woman. The reactions