The tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present


The Bystander Effect
    In this experiment, participants were told that they would be discussing “personal problems” and that they would be talking to a number of unknown others, Participants couldn't psychically see who they were talking to. One member of the group would seem to have a seizure and the experimenters then measured how long it took for participants to help the person. The experimenters found that the more participants there were, the slower they were to respond to the emergency.

    In this experiment, the bystander effect is present. The bystander effect is the tendency any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present. In this situation when there were more participants, they were less likely to help because they thought someone else would them. Another aspect of this experiment is the social exchange theory, that social behavior is the result of an exchange process. People weigh the costs against the benefits and if the rewards you anticipate exceed the costs, one will help.In this case, some of the participants that didn’t help felt shame or guilty for not helping but also believed that they would mess up the experiment or didn’t want to expose themselves to embarresment. Also during this experiment, there was a concern of altruism, doing things simply out of a desire to help. Some participants made no attempt to help during the experiments but they were far from caring about the seizure victim. These participants were in a heightened state arousal and were sweating and looked uncomfortable.

Human beings by nature are caring and compassionate but psychological and social forces can hinder our ability to help others or react in unusual situations. We can easily be influenced by the situation and the people around us, making us ignorant to people in need. The fact that we are capable of just waiting and seeing for other people to help others in need is shocking because we are aware of the situation but we are influenced to not react. By being able to label this action, the bystander effect, we can try to move forward and learn how to not fall into this trap and help others. We can learn to strengthen our natural instinct of helping others and avoid being the tendency of simply being a bystander in emergency situations.

In this paper, I was to write about an experiment or study for my Psychology class. I really enjoyed this paper because of the freedom we got to choose the study we were interested about and the freedom to format out paper anyway we wanted. I especially enjoyed being about to write a reflection about the study and what we personally thought about it. 

When a person notices a situation and defines it as requiring assistance, he or she must then decide if the responsibility to help falls on his or her shoulders. Thus, in the third step of the bystander decision-making process, diffusion of responsibility rather than social influence is the process underlying the bystander effect. Diffusion of responsibility refers to the fact that as the number of bystanders increases, the personal responsibility that an individual bystander feels decreases. As a consequence, so does his or her tendency to help. Thus, a bystander who is the only witness to an emergency will tend to conclude that he or she must bear the responsibility to help, and in such cases people typically do help. But bystanders diffuse responsibility to help when others are present. Diffusion of the responsibility is reduced, however, when a bystander believes that others are not in a position to help. For example, in one study, participants who believed that the only other witness to an emergency was in another building and could not intervene were much more likely to help a victim than were participants who believed that another witness was equally close to the victim.

Diffusion of the responsibility to help is increased when others who are viewed as more capable of helping (e.g., a doctor or police officer) are present. Research suggests that in emergency situations where a victim will suffer greatly if help is not forthcoming, bystanders relieve themselves of responsibility by asking “experts,” such as firefighters or paramedics, for assistance, thus indirectly helping. But when the costs of helping and not helping are both high, bystanders feel a strong conflict between the desire to act and the fear of helping. Bystanders often resolve this conflict by concluding that someone else will help (i.e., diffusing responsibility), thereby psychologically reducing the perceived cost of not helping the victim.

Normative social influence

A bystander’s decision regarding his or her personal responsibility to help may be affected by situational norms and expectations for behaviour. For example, in a library patrons are expected to be quiet and in a classroom students may speak up in a respectful and orderly way, but at a party people may be much less inhibited. When bystanders in an emergency situation assess their personal responsibility to act, social expectations for behaviour may influence their decision. Researchers have demonstrated the effect of situational expectations on helping behaviour by presenting people with an emergency in an area they have been told not to enter. Bystanders previously warned not to enter an area where an emergency was occurring were far less likely to help than bystanders who were told that they could enter the area. Thus, when an emergency occurs, the social context can be a powerful determinant of bystanders’ decision to intervene.

Robert D. Blagg

What is the tendency for individuals to not help someone in need if other people are around?

bystander effect, the inhibiting influence of the presence of others on a person's willingness to help someone in need. Research has shown that, even in an emergency, a bystander is less likely to extend help when he or she is in the real or imagined presence of others than when he or she is alone.

When people are less likely to help someone in distress when others are present this is called?

The bystander effect refers to the tendency for people to become less likely to assist a person in distress when there are a number of other people also present.

What factors contribute to the bystander effect?

Latané and Darley attributed the bystander effect to two factors: diffusion of responsibility and social influence. The perceived diffusion of responsibility means that the more onlookers there are, the less personal responsibility individuals will feel to take action.

Is the bystander effect a theory?

Take-home Messages. The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that an individual's likelihood of helping decreases when passive bystanders are present in an emergency situation.