Bystander Intervention Using Latane And Darley's Decision Model

University of Essex
Department of Psychology
PS407
Applied Essay

Analyse an incident of bystander intervention (or lack thereof) using Latane and Darley’s (1970) Decision Model of Bystander Intervention.
1303174

09/11/14
898 Words

Prosocial behaviour (PB) refers to any action that is done to benefit others like compliancy to rules, feeling empathy and concern for others etc. It can be seen as a helping function of society. Factors that can affect PB are evolutionary pressures, moods, emotions, altruism etc. Evolutionary pressures looks from the perspective of natural selection that as an instinct of survival it would be problematic to help others if it is inconvenient. Also inclusive fitness which argues that we are more

Research has shown that the higher the number of bystanders, the less the likelihood of the individual intervening in a situation. The BI is a theory popularized by Bibb Latane and John Darley (1968) after the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese in New York (1964). Genovese was attacked, raped and murder in early hours of the morning with several witnesses and despite there being such a large number of witnesses, nobody intervened or helped. Latane and Darley argued that there are two impairments called diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance. The former proposes that if there are multiple people at the scene, each individual will struggles to decide whether or not its their responsibility to intervene and pool the responsibility between those present. The latter proposes that people will await the response of other before acting upon their own judgments, therefore possibly perceiving that intervention is

Interpreting the event as an emergency may not be enough for one to take responsibility as shown by various studies. A prominent factors which can inhibit this stage is group presences. The presence of other can cause one to think ‘somebody else will do something’, this is called diffusion of responsibility, where each person is less responsibility one feels so they are less likely to help. However, in the video report there were 10 to 20 bystanders on the scene already attempting to help It could be said that because there was already several bystanders collectively helping, it would cause one to think somebody is already help so intervene is unnecessary, however this did not inhibit the bystander from intervening. It is also interesting that he did not join the other bystanders who were helping but he pursued forth into the