John Darley And Bibb Latane

Fundamental Attribution Error Behavior is something that changes depending on the situations that you are exposed to. This supports the fact that your behavior is also determined by different social factors that you that you could be in. In this essay I will describe the different research/case studies that’s supports the idea that our behavior changes when we are in the presence of others such as, the presence of an authority figure, the presence of a group on bystanders observing the same emergency as us, pressure from a group to change your belief even though you are wrong, social expectation to live up to a role and lastly a good or bad leader. The first social situation that shows that we change our behavior in the presence of others is when we are in the presence of an authority figure. Stanley Milgram conducted a study with participants that were chosen as the subject, and affiliates of Milgram were the victims. The subjects recited words to the victims and when the victims (purposely) recited the wrong words back the subject was told to “shock them”, even though there was no real shock being administered the subjects did

This pertains to something that we know as the “bystander effect”. This experiment was conducted by John Darley and Bibb Latane they split subjects into groups with a small amount of people, compared to groups with large amounts of people. They then staged someone having a seizure, and the study showed that in the group with less people they responded quicker and more often as opposed to the groups with larger amounts of people where the subjects responded more delayed, and not as often. (Darley & Latane, 1968). This study showed that when we are in larger groups of people we don’t act because we feel that someone else will, as compared to when we are the only ones witnessing