Overview of the Bystander Effect

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.

“What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.” -Elie Wiesel

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.

Bystanderism or the Bystander Effect can be defined as the phenomenon that an individual is less likely to help in an emergency situation when passive bystanders are present (Darley and Latané, 1968). Latane and Darley (1970) published a book entitled, Theory of the Unresponsive Bystander. According to the theory, the presence of other people or just the perception that other people are witnessing the event will decrease the likelihood that an individual will intervene in an emergency due to psychological processes like: (1) diffusion of responsibility, wherein the responsibility is diffused when more bystanders are present and this reduces the psychological costs of not intervening, (2) pluralistic ignorance or informational social influence, which means that if the situation is ambiguous people will look to other people around to see what they do, and (3) evaluation apprehension, wherein individual bystanders are aware that other people are present and may be afraid of being evaluated negatively if they react.

different times) act as if they were is a lot of pain or a drunk. The test was to see how long it took

Kitty Genovese was a woman from New York City who was stabbed to death three separate times outside her apartment building in Kew Gardens. The first two times being outside her apartment, and finally finishing her off the assailant returned stabbing her on the floor at the foot of the stairs. Much controversy arose from the Kitty Genovese murder, due to how public the murder was, and how no one stood up for her, or even alerted the police. After Kitty Genovese’s murder, questions began to arise, why didn't anyone take action, how was the assailant able to stab her three times in public, and why weren't the police or ambulances called sooner? All these questions could be answered by a syndrome, titled after the Kitty Genovese murder, as the “Bystander Effect”.

On March 13, 1964, a woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was walking towards her apartment-complex in New York City, when suddenly she was fatally stabbed on different occasions by a man named Winston Moseley. As she screamed and begged for people to help, her neighbors just stood and idly watched the incident. The neighbors were well aware of her situation due to her screams and some even watched the incident happen. There were 38 witnesses to the event, and no phone calls were made, until after her death. Why do you think no one helped? Why did her neighbors watch? What could have changed the outcome?

I believe that I have seen the possibility for the bystander effect when someone is injured. I play ultimate frisbee, and the closer knit the group is the more unlikely for the bystander effect to be observed when someone is hurt (closeness can be seen when people are talking to each other/participating in rituals).

In 1964 The Bystander Effect came about when two men of the names Bibb Latané, a social psychologist; and John Darley also a social psychologist were impacted by the murder of Kitty Genovese. Kitty had been stabbed to death outside her own apartment, while over 38 people standing nearby had watched the brutal crime being committed. These same people didn’t have the audacity to say anything or even try to stop the murderer. Those 38 people just stood there and watched while an innocent life was taken away. John Darley and Bibb Latané were so fascinated by this tragedy that they decided to create an experiment well known as the Bystander Effect. This experiment is a social psychological wonder that alludes to cases in which people don't offer

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

A short story is a work of fiction and it focuses on 1 or 2 main characters and on a single problem or conflict. To understand a short story you can look for four elements to help, setting, character, theme, and plot.

In 1964, New York, Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was stabbed to death on her doorstep--a murder the New York Times called "a frozen moment of dramatic, disturbing social change. " Thirty-seven witnesses failed to come to her aid claiming they "didn't want to get involved." (Gansberg, 1964). Whilst this claim has since been dismissed (Pelonero, 2016), ironically, her sensational case provoked a public outcry and launched a sociological theory known as the "Bystander Effect." The bystander effect is by and large viewed as a well-established experiential phenomenon in social psychology (e.g., Darley & Latané, 1968; Latané & Darley, 1968; Latané & Nida, 1981), wherein an individual, who is witness to another person in distress and requires assistance,

The main objective of this paper is for analyzing the bystander effect, to provide a historical perspective, and the relevant hypothesis associated with the bystander effect, which John Darley and Bib Latane’ studied through various experiments in 1968. There are critical events prior to the studies of the bystander effect discussed that were formed through the Society for the Psychological Study in 1936 pertaining to social issues and Kurt Lewin’s research in the 1930s that will be examined, as well as research that came after the classic study of Darley and Latane’. These researchers and the experiences mentioned in this paper are from the psychologists who were interested in the investigation of the bystander effect and in what influenced

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

Have you ever wondered why the company of others affects our behaviour? Why is our performance improved when you exercise with your friend, and impaired when you are alone? These processes have been studied for more than a century not only on people, but even on animals, like cockroaches or chickens. The first scientist who explained that phenomenon was Floyd Allport (1920). Allport based his conclusions on Tripplet’s (1889) observations, and termed it social facilitation, what means that performance of simple or well-learned tasks is improved in presence of others; and social inhibition which relates to a deterioration of difficult tasks in presence of passive audience (Hogg & Vaughan, 2008). This essay will describe and evaluate key theories such as Drive Theory, Evaluation Apprehension Theory and Distraction Conflict Theory, which explain mechanisms of social facilitation and social inhibition. But firstly it is important to refer to the observations and experiment of Norman Triplett (1889), from who all the research began.