BYSTANDER EFFECT EB

Catherine Sanderson

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008361662
• eBook ISBN: 9780008361648
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Psychology

'Fantastic … It explains the misperception of stacked odds and personal powerlessness that stops individuals challenging bad behaviour. Stunning. Humbling. Thought-provoking'
Kathryn Mannix, author of With the End in Mind

In the face of discrimination, bad behaviour, evil and abuse, why do good people so often do nothing?

Every day, we see examples of bad or immoral behaviour – from sexual harassment to political corruption, from negligence to bullying.

Why did no one stop the abduction of Jamie Bulger, despite many witnesses reporting they felt uneasy seeing the two-year-old's distress? How did the USA gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar, abuse hundreds of young women under his care for so long? Why didn't anyone intervene when David Dao, an innocent sixty-nine-year-old man, was forcibly removed from his seat on a United Airlines aeroplane and dragged down the aisle by security officers? How did large crowds of men get away with sexually assaulting an estimated 1,200 women in Cologne during the 2015 New Year's Eve celebrations?

In The Bystander Effect, pioneering psychologist Catherine Sanderson uses real-life examples, neuroscience and the latest psychological studies to explain why we might be good at recognising bad behaviour but bad at taking action against it. With practical strategies to transform your thinking, she shows how we can all learn to speak out, intervene, think outside the group mentality and ultimately become braver versions of ourselves.

Courage is not a virtue we're born with. A bystander can learn to be brave.

Notes

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1. The Myth of Monsters

1. Quoted in S. L. Plous and P. G. Zimbardo, “How social science can reduce terrorism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2004.

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2. S. Klebold, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (New York: Crown, 2016).

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3. P. G. Zimbardo, “The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order vs. deindividuation, impulse, and chaos,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. W. J. Arnold and D. Levine, 237–307 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969).

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4. A. Silke, “Deindividuation, anonymity, and violence: Findings from Northern Ireland,” Journal of Social Psychology 143 (2003): 493–499.

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5. E. Diener, R. Lusk, D. DeFour, and R. Flax, “Deindividuation: Effects of group size, density, number of observers, and group member similarity on self-consciousness and disinhibited behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (1980): 449–459.

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6. A. J. Ritchey and R. B. Ruback, “Predicting lynching atrocity: The situational norms of lynchings in Georgia,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44, no. 5 (2018): 619–637.

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7. Some neuroscience researchers have been criticized for making a particular statistical error, the nonindependence error, when testing their predictions. This error occurs when researchers first use one statistical test to select which data to analyze and then use a second (nonindependent) statistical test to analyze the data. Some of these statistical concerns are detailed in, for example, American Psychological Association, “P-values under question,” Psychological Science Agenda, March 2016, https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/03/p-values; A. Abbot, “Brain imaging studies under fire,” Nature News, January 13, 2009, https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090113/full/457245a.html.

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8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “When good people do bad things,” ScienceDaily, June 12, 2014, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140612104950.htm.

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9. M. Cikara, A. C. Jenkins, N. Dufour, and R. Saxe, “Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup competition predicts competitor harm,” NeuroImage 96 (2014): 36–43.

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10. A. C. Jenkins and J. P. Mitchell, “Medial prefrontal cortex subserves diverse forms of self-reflection,” Social Neuroscience 6, no. 3 (2011): 211–218; W. M. Kelley, C. N. Macrae, C. L. Wyland, S. Caglar, S. Inati, and T. F. Heatherton, “Finding the self? An event-related fMRI study,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14 (2002): 785–794; C. N. Macrae, J. M. Moran, T. F. Heatherton, J. F. Banfield, and W. M. Kelley, “Medial prefrontal activity predicts memory for self,” Cerebral Cortex 14, no. 6 (2004): 647–654.

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11. Quoted in A. Trafton, “Group mentality,” MIT Technology Review website, posted August 5, 2014, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/529791/group-mentality/.

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12. S. Milgram, “Behavioral study of obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963): 371–378.

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13. J. M. Burger, “Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?” American Psychologist 64 (2009): 1–11; D. Doliński, T. Grzyb, M. Folwarczny, P. Grzybała, K. Krzyszycha, K. Martynowska, and J. Trojanowski, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015? Obedience in the experimental paradigm developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 years following the original studies,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 8, no. 8 (2017): 927–933.

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14. W. H. Meeus and Q. A. Raaijmakers, “Administrative obedience: Carrying out orders to use psychological–administrative violence,” European Journal of Social Psychology 16 (1986): 311–324.

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15. T. Blass, “Attribution of responsibility and trust in the Milgram obedience experiment,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26 (1996): 1529–1535.

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16. A. Bandura, “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193–209.

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17. H. A. Tilker, “Socially responsible behavior as a function of observer responsibility and victim feedback,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 14, no. 2 (1970): 95–100.

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18. J. M. Burger, Z. M. Girgis, and C. C. Manning, “In their own words: Explaining obedience to authority through an examination of participants’ comments,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2 (2011): 460–466. Two-thirds of those whose comments during the study suggested that they felt personally responsible for harming the learner stopped before giving the maximum shock, while only 12 percent of those who kept giving shocks up to the highest level ever expressed any feelings of personal responsibility.

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19. E. A. Caspar, J. F. Christensen, A. Cleeremans, and P. Haggard, “Coercion changes the sense of agency in the human brain,” Current Biology 26, no. 5 (2016): 585–592.

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20. E. Filevich, S. Kühn, and P. Haggard, “There is no free won’t: antecedent brain activity predicts decisions to inhibit,” PloS One 8, no. 2 (2013): e53053.

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21. S. D. Reicher, S. A. Haslam, and J. R. Smith, “Working toward the experimenter: reconceptualizing obedience within the Milgram paradigm as identification-based followership,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 4 (2012): 315–324.

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22. L. Ross and R. E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (London: Pinter and Martin, 2011).

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23. Milgram, “Behavioral study of obedience.”

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24. M. M. Hollander, “The repertoire of resistance: Non-compliance with directives in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments,” British Journal of Social Psychology 54 (2015): 425–444.

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25. F. Gino, L. D. Ordóñez, and D. Welsh, “How unethical behavior becomes habit,” Harvard Business Review blogpost, September 4, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/09/how-unethical-behavior-becomes-habit.

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26. D. T. Welsh, L. D. Ordóñez, D. G. Snyder, and M. S. Christian, “The slippery slope: How small ethical transgressions pave the way for larger future transgressions,” Journal of Applied Psychology 100, no. 1 (2015): 114–127.

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27. I. Suh, J. T. Sweeney, K. Linke, and J. M. Wall, “Boiling the frog slowly: The immersion of C-suite financial executives into fraud,” Journal of Business Ethics (July 2018): 1–29.

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28. B. T. Denny, J. Fan, X. Liu, S. Guerreri, S. J. Mayson, L. Rimsky, et al., “Insula-amygdala functional connectivity is correlated with habituation to repeated nega...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I. The Silence of the Good People
• II. Bullies and Bystanders
• III. Learning to Act
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher