Why Some People Fail to React or Act during an Emergency Situation

According to Latané and Darley (1969), The Bystander Effect has three main explanations behind it, which includes diffusion of responsibility, evaluation apprehension, and pluralistic ignorance (Darley & Latané, 1968). Diffusion of responsibility withdraws a person from exhibiting a helping behavior when there are other bystanders present because it is expected that others can contribute to the helping behavior, and that the outcome is not just on one person’s shoulders (Latané et al., 2002). On the other hand, when a person imagines that there are no other people present, or that the people present are not able to engage in a helping behavior, a person will act as if he or she was alone and will be more likely to intervene in the situation (Darley, Teger, & Lewis, 1973).

In this particular research there was two experiments performed and investigated for the results of how a person reacts in the state of an emergency to help another; also to see whether the certainty or uncertainty takes place. The center question of this article is why do bystanders ignore the cry for help? This question matters because they are many case studies done and proves that they are some bystanders who are willing to help the victim in need and others just ignore the cry. One of the main findings done by the authors was that there were several researches done on this certain topic finding that certain people faces and emergency and it was more likely that an individual would help a victim in need if they were alone then in a crowd. The authors of this particular finding are Darley and Latane. The hypothesis that Latane and Darley’s made was that in a state of an emergencies are more

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,

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.

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.

It states that when the amount of bystanders increases, the likelihood of one of the bystanders assisting drastically decreases. Many feel that if they have no obligation to help they should not, almost as if it's none of their business. To victims, a bystander who doesn’t take action is as equally evil as the perpetrator. The easiness of laughing along with others, or acting as if you saw nothing is correlated to the fact that it is easier than ever to be influenced in today’s society. Too often, ignoring the humiliation of another is seen. It may be the easy way out, however, it is certainly not the morally correct way

Journalist Martin Gansberg authors the article “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police” reconstructs the murder of Ms. Catherine, a.k.a. Kitty, Genovese. All thirty-eight witnesses refrained from calling the police to aid the dying woman. Gansberg exposes the ugly truth about what results when a group of people or a society becomes apathetic and self-preserving. Society is selfish that watching others to be harmed and or killed is not significant enough to speak against or alert someone else to injustices.

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”.

They depict an experiment where a woman leaves the room and goes into an area where she can not be seen, but she can be heard. She then feigns an injury to provoke a response. [The experiments results were twenty-six individuals waited alone reacted to an accident seventy percent of the time.] Then they reenacted the same accident with individuals in a group, and only twenty-percent offered the person in distress their assistance (Darley and Latane 770). After the experiment, the individuals that did not respond said that they did not want to embarrass her because they thought that it was just a minor injury.

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

" For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens” (Gansberg # ). He had three chances to kill Miss Genovese. The police questioned some of the neighbors why no one called the police when they heard her first cry out. The responses that were given were, “I did not want to get involved” and “We thought it was a lovers’ quarrel” (Gansberg 128-129). These neighbors were fine individuals that were frightened, lazy, or just didn’t know why they did not do something. Their excuses indicate that something does not concern them or affect them why should they bother. These thirty- eight neighbors should have taken immediate action when witnessing these brutal

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.

Darley and Latané were looking for what would happen if there is no authority present during a crisis. In these two five-stage experiments, Darley and Latané investigated witness behavior. In the late, busy streets of New York, a young woman was brutally raped and murdered. The crime lasted a painful thirty-five minutes. During that time span, thirty-eight people saw the crime being committed. The majority of the witnesses turned off their lights as if no tragic event occurred. By the end of the night, one person called the police. The behavior of the bystanders evoked the attention of the psychologists to discover why humans react the way they do in a cry for help. The two experiments

“Research known as the bystander effect project, discovered that there are complicated set of factors that determine who will assist in life-threating or dangerous situation (p.107)” In short the bystander apathy can be explained simply as bystanders who witness a crime occurring yet do nothing to assist or help. Most people who are put in this situation do not want to get in involved, especially in life-threating situations for fear of putting their own life at risk. However many people are not physically or mentally prepared to see an actual violent or criminal event take place. Studies have found that the more bystanders there are the less likely it is for some one to volunteer to help. In the case of Catherine Genovese there were a total

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