The Bystander Effect In Social Psychology

Bystander Effect in Social Psychology

In 1964, the stabbing of a 28-year old woman coming home from work one night in New York City prompted the world to ask why otherwise well-meaning people sometimes let horrible things happen. 38 witnesses to the murder of that woman stood by, making no effort to interfere with the killer.

The idea that someone could be murdered and people would stand idly by became something psychologists were very concerned about. They began research and later launched a whole new field of study that became known as the Bystander effect. The fundamental idea behind this principle is that an individual in a larger crowd is, contrary to popular belief, less likely to receive aid and assistance than in a smaller crowd.

When they reviewed the police records and court documents, they discovered that the New York Times actually surprisingly misled people. There were actually people who called the police and others who yelled out of their windows.

A few years later, Peter Fisher and his colleagues did a meta-analytic synthesis. This is a combination of all the published research on the Bystander effect, and they concluded that the presence of bystanders does reduce helping responses. So, it is a real phenomenon but when digging further into the data, it can be seen that the actual situation is not as bleak as conventionally assumed. In fact there is one little thing that makes a huge

The large negative effect that are observed in most previous experiments occurred when the bystanders present were instructed to be passive. This is in fact what happened in the Darley and Latané study, where the experimenter told the others who were bystanders not to say anything. This induced a considerable amount of uncertainty for the experimental participant. When there is a passive bystander, this effect does occur. However, what happens when one person is instructed to be active and step up? The results are completely reversed. They change from having a bystander effect where people are very reluctant to help to having what could be called a helper effect, where in the presence of more people, as long as one person actively helps, people are much more likely to rush to aid others in