The Influence Of 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

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.

This essay aims to explore and describe some of the key studies within Social Psychology and show why social psychology is still important within the science of psychology today. Social psychology was once described by Allport (as cited in Lindzey & Aronson, 1985, p.5) as, “the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others”. One of the first psychologists to study social psychology was Kurt Lewin. Lewin is considered the “father of social psychology” by many as he took a stand against the dominant behaviourist approach during the 1920’s through his belief that interaction between the individual and their environment is key to affecting behaviour, rather than environment alone. His revolutionary ideas matured into the study of group dynamics, which is widely used by many organisations today (Collin, 2012).

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.

The presence of other individuals in an emergency situation tends to make people less likely to help a victim. This is known as the bystander effect. Having others around you makes you feel less responsibility and want to make the correct social decision. If a person were by himself or herself, this effect would not happen because they are not feeling judgment of those around and all the accountability is on them. The articles for this paper look at experiments conducted to test the bystander effect and how participants act according to social norms. For example, the murder of a woman in the middle of a New York street took place and not one of the thirty-eight witnesses helped her. This may seem insane but research shows most people would react the same. Social and group norms have a great influence on the social psychological concept of the bystander effect. This concept has been thought to happen due to factors of diffusion of responsibility, social influence, audience inhibition, and an overall lack of a sense of community (Chekroun, P., 2002).

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

Why the witnesses demonstrated a lack of reaction towards the victim's need for help? In 1968, two Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley came up with a concept called “The Bystander Effect”, which supposed “the presence of diffusion of responsibility” and “social influence”.

Latane and Darley (1968) did the study because they became interested in the topic following the murder of Kitty Genovese who was killed due to people not taking any form of action. They wanted to test if and how the bystander effect would work. The bystander effect is when the presence of others discourages an individual from mediating in crisis circumstances. Due to emergencies being uncommon, when they occur, people are unsure of how to deal with them. They have to be dealt with under conditions of uncertainty, stress, and fear.

this brutal murder and not one of them informed the police? The bystander effect states that, in

The Bystander Effect is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. Several factors contribute to the bystander effect, including ambiguity, cohesiveness and diffusion of responsibility. Research shows that the term bystander apathy is an incorrect description because people feel genuine concern for the victim. The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation. Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley popularized the concept following the infamous 1964 Kitty Genovese murder in New York

Cherry, F. (1995) cited in 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

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

Evaluation apprehension: Individual bystanders are aware that other people are present and may be afraid of being evaluated negatively if they react (fear of

Guerin (1993) says that research on Social Facilitation tries to study the inconsistency of human behavior in a non-social environment and inconsistency of human behavior in a social environment. Social Facilitation is not more concerned on how often this phenomenon happens in real life but on what responses an individual can provide during this occurrence (Guerin, 1993). The theory of Social Facilitation concentrates on altered behaviors that arise when an individual performs a task in an alone setting as opposed to being in the presence of other people. Lastly, Social Facilitation Theory also deals with how huge its influence extends to an individual’s performance in the