Bystander Effect

12 Key excerpts on "Bystander Effect"

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  Social Psychology

  Core Concepts and Emerging Trends

  • Daniel W. Barrett(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  As you can guess, Darley and Latané were interested in how quickly after the onset of the seizure the participants took action by finding and telling the experimenter (who was not in the room). Thus, the primary independent variable was group size, and the dependent variable was elapsed time until the participant sought help. Can you guess the results? In the two-person conditions, 85% of the participants reported the seizure, whereas 62% did so in the four-person condition, and just 31% of those in the six-person condition did so. Like in the smoke study, we see the Bystander Effect at work: As the number of bystanders increased, the likelihood of help decreased. That is to say, the presence of other people served to inhibit an individual’s natural tendency to respond. Clearly, the number of bystanders had a tremendous effect on emergency intervention.

  Diffusion of Responsibility: Phenomenon in which, as the number of bystanders increases, individuals mentally spread responsibility for intervening across many others

  Bystander Effect: Phenomenon that, as the number of onlookers in an emergency increases, the likelihood that any one person will help decreases

  Choose How to Help and Then Implement It.

  The last two steps are much more straightforward from a psychological perspective. The helper needs to decide whether to offer direct (such as CPR—cardiopulmonary resuscitation) or indirect (such as calling an ambulance) assistance. Nevertheless, the would-be helper of course needs to possess the knowledge and skills to effectively do so. Shotland and Heinold (1985) conducted an experiment to determine whether college students trained in first aid would intervene to help an injured person more often than untrained students. Although overall assistance rates were the same across the two groups, not surprisingly, trained students provided more effective help. Furthermore, would-be helpers, even if they know how to help, may refrain from doing so in order to avoid possible embarrassment, being injured, or being sued (Latané & Darley, 1969; Latané & Nida, 1981). Concerns about embarrassment or violating social norms regarding when not to help—such as during a family dispute—can lead to audience inhibition

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  Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living

  Let the Conversation Begin

  • Paul Marcus(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Latané and Nida explained these troubling findings, the “social inhibition of helping,” not in terms of personality, background or other dispositional factors, but rather in terms of three interdependent, interrelated and interactive social-psychological processes that are operative when an individual in the presence of others fails to intervene for the sake of the victim: “audience inhibition,” “social influence” and “diffusion of responsibility” (1981, p. 309).

  The first process that is socially inhibitive of helping, “audience inhibition” is when the bystander can feel anxious or fearful that their behavior can be viewed by others and judged negatively. The bystander may feel that if he intervenes and there is no “true” emergency he will be embarrassed; thus, the more onlookers present, the greater the risk of feeling mortified. The second process is “social influence,” in which the bystander looks to other people to define the meaning of the situation that is often ambiguous and confusing. When others are present and they are not offering to help the victim, the bystander sees that they are interpreting the situation as less urgent than the bystander may have judged it to be and decides that inaction is the expected and acceptable response pattern. Finally, the third social-psychological process, “diffusion of responsibility,” is a means of diminishing the psychological cost connected with not helping. When there are others present, the costs are shared and not helping becomes more probable. As Latané and Nida noted, “the knowledge that others are present and available to respond, even if the individual cannot see or be seen by them, allows the shifting of some of the responsibility to helping them.”7 It is worth mentioning that a recent meta-analysis of experimental social-psychological studies involving over 7,700 participants has confirmed the existence of the Bystander Effect, though it is attenuated under certain conditions (Fischer et al., 2011). For example, bystanders are more willing and able to intervene if they believe the perpetrator and victim are strangers rather than intimates (e.g., if they believe a man assaulting a woman during an argument is married to her or they are an “item,” the norm of family privacy is salient), or when they share group membership with the victim (e.g., a church-going man will help a fellow church member even if they are a stranger). Likewise, if one bystander helps in an emergency, others tend to follow, the former acting as a role model for the norm of social responsibility. The point is that the original Bystander Effect as described by Latané and Darley (1968) is a subtle phenomenon, in that the psychological relationships between perpetrator and victim, or between bystander and victim, are important predictors of helpful intervention, rather than simply the information that bystanders have about the presence or absence of others (Levine, 2017, p. 207).8

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  The Brain and Learning

  Supporting Emotional Health and Wellbeing in School

  • Alison Waterhouse(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Masks – You walk up and ask the person who has been pushed if they are OK You go and tell a teacher You fnd your friends and all walk over to where the incident happened and check out the person pushed into the fence 17 Share what each group has come up with and discuss the different solutions. RESOURCES 1 ‘The Bystander Effect – the science of empathy’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy6eUTLzcU4 2 ‘The Bystander Effect’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSsPfbup0ac 3 The ‘Impact of Harmdoing’ record sheet 4 Definition sheet 5 ‘What Stops Us’ information sheet IMPORTANT POINTS 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 How the brain can influence behaviour 261 Copyright material from Alison Waterhouse (2020), The Brain and Learning , Routledge bystanders, the less likely it is that one of them will help.There are several things that the bystander can do to reduce the power of the harmdoer and support the target. LEARNING LINKS Collaboration, self-development, knowledge and understanding, emotional literacy, self-awareness, problem solving. REFLECTION Questions: Positive comment from child: Positive comment from adult: LEARNING DIMENSIONS SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL SKILLS Strategic awareness Emotional literacy Learning relationships Neuroscience Curiosity Self-regulation Creativity Self-development Meaning making Changing & learning Resilience How the brain can infuence behaviour 262 Copyright material from Alison Waterhouse (2020), The Brain and Learning , Routledge How the brain can influence behaviour 263 Copyright material from Alison Waterhouse (2020), The Brain and Learning , Routledge THE Bystander Effect TERMINOLOGY What is a bystander? A bystander is a witness, someone who is in a position to know what is happening and is in a position to take action.

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  An Introduction to Social Psychology

  • Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe, Klaus Jonas, Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe, Klaus Jonas(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • BPS Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  self-efficacy (see Chapter 6) in helping: if a bystander feels that they are able to help, then helping is more likely. However, it has been pointed out that a feeling of responsibility is a more important predictor of helpfulness, although a sense of competence can contribute to feelings of responsibility (Bierhoff, 2002).

  self-efficacy beliefs about one’s ability to carry out certain actions required to attain a specific goal (e.g., that one is capable of following a diet, or to help someone).

  Summary

  The Bystander Effect is one of the most robust in social psychology: one of the key reasons why people don’t help is because of the presence of others. As the number of fellow bystanders to an emergency increases, so responsibility for helping is diffused amongst all those present: individual bystanders therefore feel less personally responsible and are less likely to intervene. Bystanders appear to react passively to emergencies, inadvertently creating a passive model for others. And fear of negative evaluation of one’s own potential helping behaviour is an additional barrier to helping. The challenge remains in terms of understanding what makes people help, as opposed to not help.

  WHY PEOPLE DO HELP

  What are the underlying motivations of prosocial behaviour?

  In the previous section we looked at some of the factors that inhibit or prevent people from helping. This approach tends to focus on the disruptions to individual cognitive decision-making. In this section we will look at a range of different approaches that have attempted to explain why people do help. These approaches take a different kind of focus. Rather than emphasizing individual cognitive processes, they explore the role of physiology, emotion and group processes.

  The costs and rewards of helping

  In contrast to Latané and Darley’s focus on explaining why people do not help, Piliavin and colleagues, contemporaries of Latané and Darley, set out to explain why people do

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  European Review of Social Psychology: Volume 24

  • Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  While the evidence for the elements of a social identity approach to helping in emergencies in its own right may be growing, it is important to begin to examine the potential for synthesis of this framework with existing approaches to helping in emergencies. We begin this task here by considering the contribution of a social identity analysis to one of the original and most reproduced approaches to the study of emergency helping: the “Bystander Effect”. In so doing we aim to illustrate how a social identity approach might add to an area already considered empirically and conceptually mature (Penner et al., 2005).

  The central claim of the traditional Bystander Effect approach is that there is an inhibiting effect of group size on helping in emergencies. Latané and Darley (1970) proposed that a negative decision at any of a series of decision-making stages would result in help not being given, and that it was the presence or absence of others that was key to the individual’s response to an emergency. Latane and Nida (1981) have suggested that the most consistent finding within this paradigm is that bystanders are more likely to intervene when alone than when in the presence of others. Thus this Bystander Effect signals the well-replicated finding that victims are more likely to be helped if there is a lone bystander than a group of bystanders. Three social psychological processes have been proposed, to which the bystander’s behaviour can be attributed: audience inhibition, pluralistic ignorance, and diffusion of responsibility. Research has suggested that these processes are independent and operate at different stages of the decision-making process (Latané & Darley, 1970; Schwartz & Gottlieb, 1976; see also Fischer et al., 2011, for a recent meta-analysis of bystander intervention in emergencies and discussion of these processes).

  In contrast, a social identity critique of the “Bystander Effect” suggests that that it is not simply the presence of others that can inhibit (or in certain cases increase, Schwartz & Gottlieb, 1976) helping, but rather it is the lack of a group-level relationship between bystanders that contributes to the circumstances under which bystanders fail to act. The Bystander Effect, impressive though it is, seems to work mostly under conditions where bystanders are strangers to each other. As Rutkowski, Grader, and Romer (1983) have pointed out, in nearly all of the studies in the Bystander Effect literature, participants tend to be placed in emergency situations with others whom they have never met before (and sometimes whom they could not even see). Rutkowski et al. argued that this resulted in groups that are low in cohesiveness, and that it was this low cohesiveness which was responsible for the Bystander Effect. They demonstrated that if participants are given time to get to know each other, then groups can encourage helping, particularly if social responsibility norms are made salient.

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  Social Psychology

  • Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  However, what really happens is help is less likely when there are many bystanders around than if there is only one. This is known as the Bystander Effect. The study produced two major findings. First, the size of the group had an effect on the percentage of subjects helping. When the subject believed that he or she was alone in the experiment with the victim, 85% of the subjects helped. The percentage of subjects offering help declined when the subject believed there was one other bystander (62%) or four other bystanders (31%). In other words, as the number of bystanders increased, the likelihood of the subject helping the victim decreased. The second major finding was that the size of the group had an effect on time between the onset of the seizure and the offering of help. When the subject believed he or she was alone, help occurred more quickly than when the subject believed other bystanders were present. In essence, the subjects who believed they were members of a larger group became “frozen in time” by the presence of others. They had not decided to help or not to help. They were distressed but could not act. WHY DOES THE Bystander Effect OCCUR? The best explanation offered for the Bystander Effect is diffusion of responsibility (Darley & Latané, 1968). According to this explanation, each bystander assumes that another bystander will take action. If all the bystanders think that way, no help will be offered. This explanation fits quite well with Darley and Latané’s findings in which the bystanders could not see each other, as was the case in the Genovese killing

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  Social Psychology

  • Jeffrey H Goldstein(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Their interpretation of this reliable finding was stated in terms of a diffusion of responsibility. If only one bystander is present at an emergency, he bears all the responsibility for dealing with it; he feels all the guilt for not acting and bears all the blame that comes from not intervening. If others are present, the onus of responsibility is shared and the blame does not rest with any one person. There is nothing in the concept of diffusion of responsibility that • 228 ALTRUISM AND HELPING BEHAVIOR Would this woman have stopped to help if she had been with her husband? Would she stop to help another woman? Research on bystander intervention has shown that the sex of the helper matters less than the number of people witnessing the incident. remotely resembles the explanations proposed in the newspapers following the murder of Kitty Genovese. The explanations most commonly given at the time depended on personal traits of the bystanders: they were apathetic, they had a fascination for violence, they were alienated from society. Do personality traits play no role in bystander intervention? To examine the role of personality more closely, Latane and Darley administered a number of personality tests to male and female New York University students who partici-pated in a laboratory experiment, presumably involving a discussion of personal problems associated with college life. Subjects completed a scale that measured their feelings of social responsibility, the Marlowe-Crowne Need for Approval Scale, the California F Scale (a measure of authoritarianism), a scale of alienation from social norms and institutions, and the Machiavellianism scale. They also com-pleted a questionnaire that asked for such personal information as church attendance, age, father's education, number of siblings, and size of home town. The experimental situation involved a discussion with one or more other students that took place over an intercom system.

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  The Social Psychology of Prosocial Behavior

  • John F. Dovidio, Jane Allyn Piliavin, David A. Schroeder, Louis A. Penner(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The number of other bystanders believed to be present when the victim had the seizure—just before the true participant's turn to talk—exerted a strong effect on the way the participants responded to this emergency. The more other bystanders the participants thought were present, the less likely the participants were to help. Eighty-five percent of the participants who thought they were alone with the victim left their cubicles and tried to help before the end of the seizure (which lasted 3 minutes), but only 62% of the people who believed that one other bystander was available and 31% of those who thought that four others were present helped during this time period. Within 6 minutes after the seizure began, 100% of the bystanders who were alone, 81% of the people with one other presumed bystander, and 62% of the people with four other presumed bystanders attempted to help.

  Because bystanders could not see one another and therefore could not be misled by each other's inaction, social influence and pluralistic ignorance cannot account for the failure to intervene. Instead, the key factor seems to be whether bystanders would take personal responsibility. When other bystanders are present, diffusion of responsibility occurs. That is, people may feel less personally responsible for helping because they come to believe that others will intervene. This process seems to be the best explanation for the lack of action by the witnesses to the Kitty Genovese incident; the witnesses saw the lights in their neighbors' apartments and assumed that one of the other witnesses would call the police or go to Kitty Genovese's rescue.

  The diffusion of responsibility effect is a fundamental process in human behavior. Merely thinking about being with others may be sufficient to make people feel less personally accountable for helping, and thus less helpful, in a subsequent situation. In a series of experiments, Garcia, Weaver, Moskowitz, and Darley (2002) asked participants to imagine being with a friend at a restaurant or movie theater or, alternatively, being with a friend at a crowded

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  Essentials of Psychology

  Concepts and Applications

  • Jeffrey Nevid(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In an ambiguous situation in which it is not clear what is happening, people are much less likely to help than in situations involving a clear-cut emergency (Baron & Branscombe, 2012). People are also less likely to help in unfamiliar environments than in familiar ones (for example, when they are in strange cities rather than in their hometowns). ■ Perceived cost. The likelihood of helping increases as the perceived cost to ourselves declines. We are more likely to lend our class notes to someone we believe will return them than to a person who doesn’t appear trustworthy. ■ Diffusion of responsibility. Whether bystanders help a person in need also depends on the number of bystanders who happen to be around (Hortensius & de Gelder, 2018). Why should the number of bystanders matter? One reason may be diffusion of responsibility—that the presence of others diffuses one’s sense of personal responsibility (Fischer et al., 2011). If you suddenly felt faint and were about to pass out on the street, you would be more likely to receive help if there were only a few bystanders than if the street were crowded with pedestrians. With fewer people present, it becomes more difficult to point to the “other guy” as the one responsible for acting. If everyone believes the other guy will act, then no one acts. ■ Similarity. People are more willing to help others whom they perceive to be like themselves—people who share a common background and beliefs. They are even more likely to help others who dress the way they do than those wear- ing different attire (Cialdini, 2007). People also tend to be more willing to help relatives than unrelated people (Gaulin & McBurney, 2001). ■ Empathy. Having empathy, or understanding of a person’s feelings or pain, is associated with a greater likelihood of helping a person in need (Batson, 2009; Penner et al., 2005).

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  Positive Social Behavior and Morality

  Social and Personal Influences

  • Ervin Staub(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  When, however, cost was higher, that is, the problems subjects worked on were presented as tests of ability and subjects had a time limit, the The Influence of Others 101 latency of response increased with increased group size. Morgan explains the findings in terms of concepts similar to those emphasized by Piliavin and Piliavin (1972), which are discussed extensively later in this chapter. In Morgan's view, diffusion occurs as the costs of intervening for the actor in-crease and the benefits of intervening for the actor decrease. Latané (1976) suggested that the extent to which people feel responsible to act in a par-ticular situation and to behave according to a norm depends on the force of the stimulus divided by some power of the number of individuals who are present. Using his model, Latané could accurately predict variation in bystanders' help for a person who dropped some objects and the extent to which people deviated from leaving a 15% tip in a restaurant as a function of the number of individuals in the group. Any conditions that affect helping behavior in general, such as the cost of helping, may have a greater effect with an increase in the number of by-standers, which diffuses responsibility. Involvement with one's own goals, the ambiguity of the stimulus, and temporary psychological states may all have greater power in reducing helping when the number of bystanders in-creases. This notion is also supported by findings of Gaertner and Dividio (1977), whose white female subjects showed no difference in their response to the plight of a white and a black victim when they were alone, but they helped the black victim less than the white victim when they believed that other bystanders were present (see Chapter 6). A further statement may be also reasonable: When any conditions (external or internal) focus responsi-bility more on a particular person, other conditions that may diminish helping are less likely to be influential.

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  The Psychology of Prosocial Behavior

  Group Processes, Intergroup Relations, and Helping

  • Stefan Stürmer, Mark Snyder, Stefan Stürmer, Mark Snyder(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  However, helping members of your own group 11 | Groups, Identities, and Bystander Behavior 219 could be discounted as simple self-interest – leaving the stereotype unchallenged. However, helping the out-group is more difficult to dismiss as an act of self-interest – and can thus be offered as unam-biguous evidence to counteract the stereotype of the Scots as mean. Practical Implications In this chapter we have presented evidence for the importance of identity processes in helping both in-group and out-group members. However, the important step for any new theoretical approach is the turning of theory into practice. After all, one of the main criticisms leveled at the traditional “Bystander Effect” approach is that, despite being one of the most robust and reproduced findings in academic social psychology, it lacked practical utility when it came to increasing real world interventions. How then might our focus on social identity be useful in promoting helping in emergencies? We began this chapter with the story of Kitty Genovese and the 38 witnesses. We argued that there was no evidence to support the idea that bystanders failed to act or that the presence of others had an inhibitory effect. Despite this, the 38 witnesses story still has a hold over the psychological imagination. When we think about bystander behavior in emergencies we think about a “society of strangers” who share public spaces (like city streets, public parks, shopping malls, and train carriages) but who are psychologically isolated from each other. At first sight, this seems to pose particular problems for a social identity based account of helping. These public spaces are places where people are unlikely to share a common group identity. Thus, the first issue for a social identity based account of emergency helping is whether collective identities can ever be engendered in such contexts.

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  Technology and Youth

  Growing Up in a Digital World

  • Sampson Lee Blair, Patricia Neff Claster, Samuel M. Claster, Sampson Lee Blair, Patricia Neff Claster, Samuel M. Claster(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  M., & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 8 (4p1), 377. DeSmet, A., Veldeman, C., Poels, K., Bastiaensens, S., Van Cleemput, K., Vandebosch, H., & De Bourdeaudhuij, I. (2014). Determinants of self-reported bystander behavior in cyberbullying incidents amongst adolescents. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking , 17 (4), 207 À 215. Dunn, S. T. M. (2009). Upstanders: Student experiences of intervening to stop bullying . Doctoral dissertation, University of Alberta. 69 Factors that Influence Bystander Behavior Erdur-Baker, O ¨ . (2010). Cyberbullying and its correlation to traditional bullying, gender and frequent and risky usage of internet-mediated communication tools. New Media and Society , 12 (1), 109 À 125. Espelage, D., Green, H., & Polanin, J. (2012). Willingness to intervene in bullying episodes among middle school students individual and peer-group influences. The Journal of Early Adolescence , 32 (6), 776 À 801. Espinoza, G., & Juvonen, J. (2011). The pervasiveness, connectedness, and intrusiveness of social network site use among young adolescents. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking , 14 (12), 705 À 709. Evers, K. E., Prochaska, J. O., Van Marter, D. F., Johnson, J. L., & Prochaska, J. M. (2007). Transtheoretical-based bullying prevention effectiveness trials in middle schools and high schools. Educational Research , 49 (4), 397 À 414. Faris, R., & Felmlee, D. (2011). Status struggles network centrality and gender segregation in same-and cross-gender aggression. American Sociological Review , 76 (1), 48 À 73. Faris, R., & Felmlee, D. (2014). Casualties of social combat school networks of peer victimiza-tion and their consequences. American Sociological Review , 79 (2), 228 À 257. Gini, G., Albiero, P., Benelli, B., & Altoe, G. (2008). Determinants of adolescents’ active defending and passive bystanding behavior in bullying.

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