Factors Influencing Bystanderism

849 Words4 Pages

The bystanderism can be defined as the phenomenon where people do not offer help in emergency situations when other people are present, even if when one is capable of doing so. In this essay an examination of factors influencing bystanderism will be conducted.
Theory of Latané and Darley (1970) the unresponsive bystander says that the presence of other people or just the perception that if other people are witnessing the event will decrease the likelihood that an individual will intervene in an emergency due to psychological processes. These psychological processes could be diffusion of responsibility; the responsibility is reduced if more people are present which would reduce the cost of not intervening. The second one is informational social influence which is pluralistic ignorance; if the situation happens to be ambiguous people might look around to see what other people do. The last one is evaluation apprehension; individual bystanders are aware that other people are present therefore they might be afraid of being evaluated negatively if the react.
Latané …show more content…

The factors for that could be because when being in a room full of people we might be waiting for someone else to react instead of doing something you sit there and wait. When it comes to the cost reward model of helping, we can see that from Pilliavin et al (1969) people were more likely to help the victim who appeared to be ill compared to the one being drunk. That could be because of the factors that we simply do not know how to handle when someone is drunk if they will be violent or not, compared to the victim being sick. Being sick is been seen less violent towards the one helping since when being sick it is something that you did not do to