The Bystander Effect By Bibb Latane And John Darley

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.

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 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

One of the most well known of these cases is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old female who was brutally attacked in the streets of New York City. Although this may seem along the lines of an everyday murder case, the difference is that, while she was being attacked, none of Kitty’s reported 38 neighbors who heard her screams did anything as much as call the police (CITE PSYCH TODAY). While calling the police may not have saved Kitty’s life, the fact that no single neighbor took any action has had psychologists puzzled for years. How could you hear her screams and see her being attacked and fail to do anything? Psychologists have named this phenomenon the “bystander effect.”

A haunting story that will always stay stagnant through time is the case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman living in New York. In March of 1964 she was walking home in the early morning from work. A man under the name of Winston Moseley followed her with his car, eventually got out, chased after her, and stabbed her multiple times. She cried for help to any and all neighbors living in her apartment complex, one man even yelling at Winston to leave her alone. None of them, for that matter, called the police. As he continued to stab her, he raped her. Then he laid her body on the side of the road, and left. This was the first case to coin the term ‘bystander effect’. Thirty-eight witnesses watched and heard her cries for help, none of them deciding

The problem my group has chosen to address is a problem many people experience throughout their lifetime: ambiguous emergency situations. Every year there are over 240 million 911 calls in the United States (National, 2014). For each call, there are countless people who do not call 911 in potential emergency situations. Situations of emergency nature often demand prompt action, however situational influences may create barriers and slow or halt any response (Latane & Nida, 1981). Due to these situational influences, people may have a difficult time understanding when an emergency response is warranted. Added to the ambiguous nature of some emergencies, this combination can be deadly.

Secondly, being an individual member of a larger crowd has been shown to inhibit helping behavior. Levine (1999) discuses this “audience inhibition and diffusion of responsibility” (p. 1135) in his analysis of bystander nonintervention. In three separate experiments by Latane and Darley (1969) these effects were demonstrated and it was determined that “[p]eople are less likely to take a socially responsible action if other people are present than if they are alone (p.259). They further state that due to the different types of situations tested that the same process must occur in real life as well (p.

The bystander effect is associated with the phenomenon, which states that when a larger amount of people are present, the less likely people are to help a person in need of assistance. When an emergency occurs, people are more likely to help when there are little or no other people. A summary about this study as well as an explanation of the results and how the concept of situationism relates to the study will be discussed.

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

Burr, V. chapter eight Bystander intervention in Critical Readings in Social Psychology second edition (2012) Landridge, D. Taylor, S. and Mahendran, K The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes

Concluding with a summary of findings into the two approaches used in investigating the Bystander Effect. Firstly ‘The Bystander Effect’ (Latne & Darley, 1970) is described as the finding that an individual is

Article While attending GoodLife Fitness gym, actress and Toronto native Alex Jade saved the life of a fellow gym-goer when he went into cardiac arrest. Jade, who had prior training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, jumped to action when onlookers and employees did not. After the events, she reported how one employee, unbothered by the events taking place, strolled over to the victim, placed the defibrillator beside the him and stepped away. This prompted Jade to take action. The actress ran over, utilized the defibrillator and CPR methods until emergency responders reached the gym and took the man to the hospital to perform surgery.

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