Essay on The Bystander Effect: How Big Is to Big of a Group?

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.

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.

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

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.]

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

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

Bystander apathy is a strange psychological effect that has been observed over several years. It happens when a person is in a large group of people and an emergency is occurring. Although under different circumstances the person will have the reasonable reaction and assist the person in need. However when in a large group of people the people who are observing the emergency go through an occurrence called “diffusion of responsibility”. This causes them to think that because of the amount of people around the emergency, one of them will act, allowing them to be inactive. This is an issue as this causes every person around the area think that others will act, therefore, nobody acts as a result.

Learned helplessness, “teaches us not to get involved in shaping the world we’ll pass on to our children” (Loeb 31). We learn not to get involved because no matter what we do, one person cannot stop something that might happen, so we give up or do not try at all. We all need to participate in shaping the world because if we do not, then someone else is going to do it for us and we might not like what he or she will do. Perfect standard, “before we will allow ourselves to take action on an issue, we must be convinced not only that the issue is the world’s most important, but that we understand it perfectly, will be able to express our views with perfect eloquence, and that we ourselves have perfect moral character” (Loeb 46). This reminds me of someone getting their Ph.D. because they must know everything about their subject before they can do anything with it. I understand that people do not like looking stupid, especially when it is something they are supporting. I have seen many protesters protest something and when they are asked about it, they can never give you a clear answer to your question. Social involvement “helps us enter new worlds. We may build on our existing values and knowledge, but we also develop new priorities, gain new skills, meet new people, hear and heed new stories…We become linked to others who share our vision” (Loeb 233). When we are involved with others, we can gain so much from them and learn more about

When it comes to helping others, studies have uncovered an apparent paradox in social psychology called the ‘bystander effect’ (Weiten 2007, p.684). The bystander effect is a theory of pro-social or helping behaviour

The purpose of this research paper is to help precisely identify the “bystander effect” as defined by noted social psychologists. It will also explain why the bystander effect occurs and with whom it occurs more often. Using multiple examples of psychological studies on this concept, this paper will give reasons the bystander effect is an important and yet controversial thing to study. Additionally, it will outline how these studies are conducted and the setbacks of those methods. Lastly, this paper will come to a conclusion based on the results of the studies cited.

Each of us has the capacity to help others. Demonstrations of courage by everyday heroes are lauded, as they show the best of human nature. Unfortunately, human nature has its faults as well, and people fall victims to others when others seek to do harm; additionally, people fall victim to others when those around fail to act in preventing that harm. Social psychology research and experimentation have defined a “bystander effect.” This describes how, when in the presence of many others, an individual will diffuse responsibility when seeing a potentially dangerous interaction occurring and will be less likely to intervene. Despite our intentions and self-serving biases, most of us are susceptible to the effect.

John Darley and Bibb Latane first demonstrated this effect in 1968 following the murder of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was murdered in 1964 by Winston Moseley who stabbed her to death near her home in Queens, New York. Darley and Bibb discovered that the probability of assistance is inversely related to the number of bystanders present. The more bystanders, the less likely a person will offer help to a victim in need. In one experiment, Latane and Judith Rodin staged a distress situation. 70 percent of people, who were alone, offered help to the woman in distress. However, only 40 percent of people offered help when there were more people present in a room (“Bystander Effect,” n.d.). The case of Kitty Genovese further supports our society’s growing societal apathy. Social apathy goes against most religions’ belief in the “Golden Rule,” which states, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” To be apathetic in society goes against a human being’s nature. It is virtually impossible to do anything without feeling any form of emotion. Social apathy reverses altruism and well-placed morals in our society. If social apathy were to rise in the coming years, our community and society would be easily subject to

Pluralist ignorance helps to explain the bystander effect. Pluralist ignorance explains that in a group, if they majority of the group reject a norm but will assume that everyone else has accepted it, which leads them to inevitably accept it themselves. In turn, this helps to explain that if no one reacts when they witness an emergency, others witnesses may believe that reacting would be wrong and therefore no one does anything. the Bystander effect could most definitely be used to explain the domino effect that seems to have occurred on the night of the murder, as each neighbor noticed that no one intervened, leading them do the same, but it is really difficult to believe that this misfortune can be explained this simply. The bystander effect can be linked the Georg Simmel’s theory of individuals acting differently in groups, as we conform to what we think people in the group would like us to do. If the bystander effect was indeed what occurred on the night of the murder, it is regretful that not one person could have broken away from the pack and tried to help Kitty

“Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.” It was a dark cold night. The sky was dusky and the moon was NEW. As usual, I took my long walk starting from my neighborhood, till the next one and back. But this night was not just a normal. It was a horrible yet frightening night that engraved one of the heaviest, most profound experiences in my life! “One of the ill effects of cruelty is that it makes the bystanders cruel.” (Thomas Fowell Buxton)