Bystander Effect in Social Psychology

Bystander Effect in Social Psychology

In 1964, the stabbing of a 28-year old woman coming home from work one night in New York City prompted the world to ask why otherwise well-meaning people sometimes let horrible things happen. 38 witnesses to the murder of that woman stood by, making no effort to interfere with the killer (Gansberg M., 1964).

The idea that someone could be murdered and people would stand idly by became something psychologists were very concerned about. They began research and later launched a whole new field of study that became known as the Bystander effect. The fundamental idea behind this principle is that an individual in a larger crowd is, contrary to popular belief, less likely to receive aid and assistance than in a smaller crowd (Darley & Latané, 1968).

Kitty Genovese’s death and hence the concept of the Bystander effect became the textbook example of passive group behavior, bearing considerable importance in the field of contemporary psychology as it has not only been credited with helping spur Good Samaritan laws in many US states but also for making people think critically about why they don't always do as much to help as they think they should.

Research

In 1968 John Darley and Bibb Latané (Latané, B. & Darley, 1968) took subjects, put headphones on them, took them in a room and asked them to listen to other people. They were made to feel that they were either alone, with 2 other people or with 5 other people. The two distinguished social psychologists tried something very traumatic. They had the experimental subjects listen to someone describing the symptoms of a stroke and then desperately calling out for help. What they were interested in was to find out whether the individual with headphones on, alone in a room would yell out for help or even break the bounds of the experiment to offer help.  As expected, it was found that in a 6 minute period following the onset of the individual describing stroke symptoms, when a person was made to feel alone, over 80% helped within a 6 minute time window. However, what is interesting is that when they thought there were 2 more people present, the numbers were reduced to 60%. Even worse, in the belief that there were five other people present, less than 40% reacted to the urgent call for help.

This was described at that time as being a result of diffusion of responsibility, meaning that in the presence of other people, an individual does not feel the responsibility to step up and intervene to help.

Criticism

However, going back actually to that first scenario of Kitty Genovese in 1964, Rachel Manning and her colleagues found that the story wasn't as clean as people thought (Manning et al. 2007). When they reviewed the police records and court documents, they discovered that the New York Times actually surprisingly misled people. There were actually people who called the police and others who yelled out of their windows.

A few years later, Peter Fisher and his colleagues did a meta-analytic synthesis. This is a combination of all the published research on the Bystander effect, and they concluded that the presence of bystanders does reduce helping responses (Fischer et al. 2011). So, it is a real phenomenon but when digging further into the data, it can be seen that the actual situation is not as bleak as conventionally assumed. In fact there is one little thing that makes a huge difference.

 In this particular study, they cumulated across multiple studies and they were able to give an estimate of how big is the effect if one more person is active. The large negative effect that are observed in most previous experiments occurred when the bystanders present were instructed to be passive. This is in fact what happened in the Darley and Latané study, where the experimenter told the others who were bystanders not to say anything. This induced a considerable amount of uncertainty for the experimental participant. When there is a passive bystander, this effect does occur. However, what happens when one person is instructed to be active and step up? The results are completely reversed. They change from having a bystander effect where people are very reluctant to help to having what could be called a helper effect, where in the presence of more people, as long as one person actively helps, people are much more likely to rush to aid others in need.