Theories 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

The bystander effect also arises from a diffusion of responsibility as each bystander can better rationalize his or her lack of action. In some cases, people assume that in a large group, there will be someone else that is more qualified to help and therefore, each person feels less obligated to act. For example, a doctor is far more qualified to provide medical assistance to a victim and likewise, a police officer or stronger-bodied man can better subdue a perpetrator. If the crowd of bystanders is large,

Social psychology first examined the phenomena later termed “bystander effect” in response to a 1964 murder. The murder of a young woman with as many as 38 witnesses and none who helped until it was too late. The bystander effect is individuals seeing an emergency situation but not helping. There are many reasons why individuals do not respond: diffusion of responsibility, not noticing or unsure if it is an emergency, and not wanting to be liable if the person still dies are a few.

Picture this. Someone is on their daily 3.5km run and as they pass the bus stop a woman grabs her chest and collapses. There are crowds of people passing by her but no one’s stopping to help. They probably aren't going to stop and help, because no one is stopping they are going to think if those many people aren’t stopping to help then she is fine, they might also be thinking someone else will help her. Now picture this that same person is out just for a walk around the park and they hear someone cry out for help, no one’s around but them so they probably would go over and help them. These situations are representing the bystander effect. John Darley and Bibb Latane came up with the bystander effect, the bystander effect states that the more people that are present the less likely anyone is to help someone in need. The bystander effect can be connected to the characters in William Golding's Lord of the flies. People just stand by in emergency situations when other people are around, and them no helping the victim can have some serious consequences.

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).

Walking along the busy street of Manhattan, Katie becomes light headed passing out; although she is in a large group of people, no one stops to help. This phenomenon is called the “bystander effect.” A bystander is often anyone who passed by, witnessed, or even participated in a certain situation (Polanin, Espelage & Pigott, 2012). The bystander effect is the idea that the larger the group, the less likely an individual is to be helped. The likelihood of someone getting helped is inversely compared to the number of people who are around witnessing the event at the time. This phenomenon has played a huge role in the increase of civilians failing to be helped in the past years, and is starting to have more light shined upon it. Knowledge of

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 is defined as the higher the number of people who notice an emergency, the less of a chance that those bystanders will help the victim (as cited in Aronson, Wilson, Akert, & Sommers, 2015). The importance of the bystander effect is unparalleled because it determines whether humans will still help in a situation when there are other people available. Bystanders can deal with situations ranging from the mundane to the dire, but what matters is the number of those who take action.

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

Well it does and it’s called Bystander Nonintervention. Bystander Nonintervention means just the way it sounds; it’s when people, bystanders, watch instead of intervene in a situation. This article relates very well to chapter 13 in our psychology. I would say this article is the number #1 example used to show bystander nonintervention, I mean it’s used in the book. So what causes bystander intervention? It’s not so much that people don’t care, which psychologist used to think was the case, coining the term bystander apathy. But the bystander effect was more along the lines of “psychological paralysis” according to John Darley and Bibb Latane. People want to help in an emergency but find themselves frozen perhaps because of shock. With bystander nonintervention there is more danger in numbers than safety, totally opposite from what you usually hear. The more people around the less likely people will help. There are to major factors the contribute to bystander nonintervention according to Darley and Latane; pluralistic ignorance which prevent us from interpreting if a situation is an emergency, if no one is around helping is must not be an emergency, and diffusion of responsibility which discourages us from offering assistance in an emergency, if you don’t help it’s not your

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

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.]

Imagine you get attacked while in your car, in the middle of heavy traffic, on your way to work. The attacker had a knife and baseball bat. They break open your window with the baseball bat, drop it, and start to stab at you. You get cut, and start to scream for help. But none of the hundreds of others come to you aid. They quickly disperse, causing an accident, and leave you on your own to die. You get cut at the heart, and thrown out of the car, left to die. “Why didn’t they help him?” many other people would think. The answer to that is something called the bystander effect. The Bystander Effect is when someone who is capable of helping another person in danger, does nothing but idly stand by, watching the event happen.

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