Evaluate The Bystander Theory In The Case Of Kitty Genovene

In 1964, a young woman Kitty Genovese was coming home from work. She was murdered by a man, and while she screamed outside her apartment, 38 witnesses saw this murder and did nothing. Her murder sparked up one of the biggest psychological theories, the bystander effect. The bystander theory is an individual is less likely to offer help to a victim in the presence of other people. Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané were interested in this case and decided to look more into it. They set up an experiment to prove their hypothesis that the larger the number of people who witnesses an event decreased the willingness of an individual to help. Darley and Latané got students from a psychology class from New York University to help in this experiment of theirs. They told the

There were multiple groups. Group 1 had two people, Group 2 had three people, and Group 3 had six people. Each participant was alone, and they were not talking to each other as it was all recorded but they didn’t know it. Darley and Latané have a fake recorded seizure emergency call to go over the intercoms to see how long it took for the students to react and help the other student have a ´seizure´. As the emergency fake seizure call went on, the group's results were very different from one another. Group 1 with two people, both reported a seizure emergency. In group 2 with three people, only 85% of participants reported the emergency. In group 3 with six people, only 60% of participants reported the emergency. Group 1 took less than a minute to report, although group 3 was over 3 minutes. (Hock, 2015) The psychologists found out that if you witness an emergency in which someone may require help, many factors affect your decision to step in and offer assistance. Other factors fall into play that could affect someone's decision to help. Such as being scared of being wrong, embarrassed, or having a shy