The Bystander Effect: The Tragedy Of

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.

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.

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.

1. After the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, John Darley and Bibb Latane were in shock as the rest of the city/world that a 28 year old lady could be stabbed in a neighborhood with about 38 by standers or more and say or do nothing. Why didn’t anyone try and help her? How could people stand by and watch this go on? People speculated that the failure of people to get involved might be due more to the influence (socially) that bystanders have on each other. To test this theory, Darley and Latane, two psychologists, decided to conduct a study. “Diffusion of Responsibility” Everyone hopes that someone else will be the first to step up

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.

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.

The psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) were interested in the Genovese incident and sought to find the answer to this psychological phenomenon. In their experiment, Darley and Latané hypothesized that the higher number of bystanders would decrease helping behavior and vice versa. The two manipulated the number of confederates during each trial and recorded the time it took for the participants to report the simulated seizure. Their results confirmed that if were more confederates, each participant would feel less pressured to help, leading to the discovery of the bystander effect.

In the experiment they tested the responsiveness of individuals and how they reacted under stress when first, alone, and then second within a crowd. Each time the people that were under pressure and alone reacted in a higher rate than those in the crowds. Researchers have justified people’s non responsiveness within a crowd, with diffusion of responsibility, in which people are less likely to take action within a crowd, because they feel someone else will take responsibility. On March 14 1964, Kitty Genovese was the ultimate test subject for the Bystander Syndrome, having been stabbed twice in public and left to die on her apartment stairs, but the question that remains unanswered, under matters of a life, is the silence of the crowd truly due to diffusion of responsibility? Or lack of interest and

Honestly yes they should have the responsibility to intervene when something bad is happening. Because who wouldn’t want to help someone who is trouble that needs help from a bystander that just passing by. My question is “ are they at fault if they don’t intervene ?” Bystanders should not have to live with the guilt that they should have, or they should've done something to stop but didn’t. You don’t have to have to hold it against you that you didn’t help them because you weren’t sure if you should intervene with something so dangerous that could possibly hurt you.

Have you ever seen an incident happen and not do anything about it? Well in “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police”, thirty-eight people saw a murder happen and decide not to do anything about it. By watching an incident happen and not intervene is called the bystander effect this is where you watch an event happen and do nothing because you feel like it’s none of your business or because someone else isn’t helping why should you. In this essay the writer explains an incident that happened and how people witnessed it but didn’t do anything making them bystanders.

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?

The bystander effect theory is a psychological phenomenon were people do not help others in emergency situations when there are others present, the bigger the crowd the less likely chance of someone stepping in to help. In 1964, there was a woman who was brutally murdered and there were approximately 30 witnesses who did not intervene to save her. This case was

In the Bystander Effect video, there were people present at the incident but none of the bystanders helped the participants in the study. “Bystander effect the tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present” (Myers,2014, p. 495). The study was done in Liverpool Street Station in London a busy side of town. The first participant was named Peter he laid on the side walk for more than twenty minutes asking from help from bystanders and no one would help him. Peter did not fit in with the environment in the Liverpool Street Station. Peter was not dressed up he had on blue jeans with a black jacket with tennis shoes. The second participant named Ruth was dressed in blue skirt with a black jacket and she was laying unresponsive on the steps of the Liverpool Street

The Bystander Effect is a controversial theory given to social phenomenon where the more potential bystanders there are, the less likely any individual is to help in emergency situations. A traditional explanation for the cause of the Bystander Effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. (Kyle et al.) The Bystander effect, also known as the Genovese Syndrome, was named after the infamous murder of “Kitty” Catherine Genovese in 1964, on the streets of New York in front of thirty-seven witnesses. After studying the Genovese syndrome and doing research on how this phenomenon occurs even today, it is clear The Bystander Effect is not just a theory, but actually fact.

The social psychological phenomenon addressed in the Daily Mail Article ‘How ‘selfie syndrome’ has taken indifference to a different level’ is the Bystander effect. The Bystander effect as characterized by Hogg and Vaughan refers to the likelihood that people are less likely to help in an emergency situation when they are with others versus when they are alone. They also deduced that as the number of people present increases the less likely it is that anyone present will help (Hogg & Vaughan, 2014). The concept of the bystander effect was first established by John Darley and Bibb Latané in the 1960’s after the murder of Kitty Genovese. The purpose of their study was to establish how bystanders react in an emergency situation. Before investigating