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The Bystander Effect In 1964 the murder case of Kitty Geneses, a woman who was stabbed 38 mimes while bystanders watched and did nothing to help, caught the attention of John Darrel and Bibb Late. Darrel and Late conducted many experiments in an effort to rationalize the psychology behind the bystander effect (Cherry, 2014). The experiments involved situating a participant either alone or with other participants and staging and emergency scenario.
Darrel and Late then measured the time it took participants to respond to the emergency. They also measured whether they took intervention measures or not. The results showed that the presence Of other participants made participants reluctant etc eloping by a considerable margin (Dean, 2007). Method Darrel and Late determined that for obvious reasons they would not be able to reproduce the events of the Geneses murder but needed a situation that would approximate a true emergency in order for the bystanders to be observed.
Darrel and Latent told students taking an introductory psychology class at New York University a covers story stating, that they were conducting a study on how students adjust to university life in a competitive, urban environment and the types of personal problems they were experiencing. They told the students they would be in separate rooms to avoid any comfort. The students were then asked to take turns talking to one another through an intercom and each student would be allowed two minutes to talk (Darrel and Late, 1968).
The students were then divided into three different experimental conditions. The participants in group 1 believed they would only be talking to one other person; participants in group 2 thought they were talking to two others and those in group 3 were told that they would be talking to five other people. In actuality, the subjects were alone and the voices were on tape (Darrel and Late, 1968). Darrel and Late then decided that most people would interpret a realistic epileptic seizure as an emergency.
As the discussions began, the participants heard from the first “student,” a male, who had trouble concentrating on his studies and sometimes, suffered severe seizures. Then the conversations were switched, in group 1 it was the participants turn while in the other two groups the participants heard from other students before it was their turn. The emergency occurred when the first student spoke again. The first student spoke normally, but then began to have a seizure (Darrel and Late, 1968). Darrel and Late measured the percentage of subjects in each group who left their cubicle to help the student in trouble.
They also measured how long it took participants to respond to the emergency. The participants were given four minutes to act, before the experiment was ended (Darrel and Late, 1968). Results The results from the study supported their hypothesis, which they called diffusion of responsibility. According to Darrel and Late (1 968), ” As subjects believed there were a greater number of others present, the percentage who reported the seizure quickly, that is, as the attack was occurring, decreased dramatically.
Among those who eventually helped, the amount of delay in helping was greater when more bystanders were present. ‘ (p 2) The average delay in responding was less than one minute for group 1, whereas it was over three minutes for group 3. “Finally, the total number of subjects who reported the seizures at all, either during or after it occurred, varied among the groups in a similar way. All of the subjects in group 1 reported the emergency, but only 85% of group 2 and 60% of group 3 did so at any time during the four-minute period” (Darrel and Late, 1968. P 2)
Situations The Oxford Dictionary defines Situations as, “The theory that human behavior is determined by surrounding circumstances rather than by personal qualities. ” Situations is basically the way people behave in the type of situation they are in. In the study of the bystander effect, ” the likelihood of intervention inversely correlates with the number of people who are part of that situation. In other words, the larger the number of people present, the less likely it is that any of these individuals will help” (The philosophers Magazine, 2013).
Research such as these in social psychology; suggest that situations have a big impact on Howe act. What is more interesting is that research suggests that we are not aware of the impact that environmental factors have on us, if in fact we are even aware of these situational aspects. (The Philosophers Magazine, 2013) Conclusion With the amount of open-mindedness we have in our society today do believe that if this study were to be replicated, the results would be different. Even though we still have biases and stereotyping in today’s society, I believe that it far surpasses the biases people had back in the 1 ass’s.