The Bystander Effect

Understanding the Psychology of Courage and Inaction

Catherine Sanderson

• Editorial: William Collins
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780008361648
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Social Psychology

Why do good people so often do nothing when a small intervention could make a big difference? Pioneering psychologist Catherine Sanderson demystifies the mindset of bullies and bystanders to show why courage comes at such a high cost, and how we 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...