Bordens Social Psychology (3rd ed)

Figure 11.3 The fivestage model of helping. The path to helping begins with noticing an emergency situation. Next, a potential helper must label the situation correctly as an emergency and then assume responsibility for helping. A negative decision at any point will lead to nonhelping.

Based on Darley and Latané (1968) and Latané and Darley (1968).

see what others are doing (the process of social comparison). If others are not concerned, we may not define the situation as an emergency, and we probably will not offer to help.

In one study, increasing or decreasing the availability of cues from another bystander affected helping (Darley, Teger, & Lewis, 1973). Subjects were tested either alone or in groups of two. Those participating in groups were either facing each other across a table (face-to-face condition) or seated back-to-back (not-facing condition). An emergency was staged (a fall) while the subjects worked on their tasks. More subjects who were alone helped (90%) than subjects who were in groups. However, whether subjects were facing each other made a big difference. Subjects who were facing each other were significantly more likely to help (80%) than subjects not facing each other (20%). Consider what happens when you sit across from someone and you both hear a cry for help. You look at her, she looks at you. If she then goes back to her work, you probably will not define the situation as an emergency. If she says, “Did you hear that?” you are more likely to go investigate.

Generally, we rely on cues from other bystanders more and more as the ambiguity of the situation increases. Thus, in highly ambiguous emergency situations, we might expect the presence of others who are passive to suppress helping. The fact that the witnesses to Genoveseʼs murder were in their separate apartments and did not know what others were doing and thinking operated to suppress intervention.

Stage 3: Assuming Responsibility to Help: The Bystander Effect

Noticing and correctly labeling a situation as an emergency are not enough to guarantee that a bystander will intervene. It is certain that the 38 witnesses to Genoveseʼs murder noticed, to one degree or another, the incident and probably labeled it as an emergency. What they did not do is conclude that they had a responsibility to help. Darley and Latané (1968), puzzled by the lack of intervention on the part of the witnesses, thought that the presence of others might inhibit rather than increase helping. They designed a simple yet elegant experiment to test for the effects of multiple bystanders on helping. Their experiment demonstrated the power of the bystander effect, in which a person in need of help is less likely to receive help as the number of bystanders increases.

Subjects in this experiment were told it was a study of interpersonal communication. They were asked to participate in a group discussion of their current problems. To ensure anonymity, the discussion took place over intercoms. In reality, there was no group. The experimenter played a tape of a discussion to lead the subject to believe that other group members existed.

Darley and Latané (1968) varied the size of the group. In one condition, the subject was told that there was one other person in the group (so the group consisted of the subject and the victim); in a second condition, there were two other people (subject, victim, and four others). The discussion went along uneventfully until it was the victimʼs turn to speak. The actor who played the role of the victim on the tape simulated a seizure. Darley and Latané noted the number of subjects who tried to help and how long it took them to try to help.

The study produced two major findings. First, the size of the group had an effect on the percentage of subjects helping. When the subject believed that he or she was alone in the experiment with the victim, 85% of the subjects helped. The percentage of subjects offering help declined when the subject believed there was one other bystander (62%) or four other bystanders (31%). In other words, as the number of bystanders increased, the likelihood of the subject helping the victim decreased.

bystander effect The social phenomenon that helping behavior is less likely to occur as the number of witnesses to an emergency increases.

diffusion of responsibility

An explanation suggesting that each bystander assumes another person will take responsibility to help.

The second major finding was that the size of the group had an effect on time between the onset of the seizure and the offering of help. When the subject believed he or she was alone, help occurred more quickly than when the subject believed other bystanders were present. In essence, the subjects who believed they were members of a larger group became “frozen in time” by the presence of others. They had not decided to help or not to help. They were distressed but could not act.

Interestingly, the “other bystanders” need not be physically present in order for the bystander effect to occur. In one experiment conducted by Garcia, Weaver, Moskowitz, and Darley (2002), participants were asked to imagine that they had won a dinner for either themselves and 30 friends, 10 friends, or just for themselves (alone condition). Later participants were asked to indicate how much money they would be willing to donate to charity after they graduated college. Garcia et al. found that participants indicated the lowest level of donations in the 30 friends condition, and the most in the alone condition (the 10-friends condition fell between these two groups). This effect extends to computer chat rooms (Markey, 2000). Markey found that as the number of participants in a chat room increased, the time it took to receive requested help also increased. Interestingly, the chat room bystander effect was eliminated when the person making the request personalized the request by singling someone out by name.

Why Does the Bystander Effect Occur?

The best explanation offered for the bystander effect is diffusion of responsibility (Darley & Latané, 1968). According to this explanation, each bystander assumes that another bystander will take action. If all the bystanders think that way, no help will be offered. This explanation fits quite well with Darley and Latanéʼs findings in which the bystanders could not see each other, as was the case in the Genovese killing. Under these conditions, it is easy to see how a bystander (unaware of how other bystanders are acting) might assume that someone else has already taken or will take action.

What about emergency situations in which bystanders can see one another? In this case, the bystanders could actually see that others were not helping. Diffusion of responsibility under these conditions may not explain bystander inaction (Latané & Darley, 1968). Another explanation has been offered for the bystander effect that centers on pluralistic ignorance, which occurs when a group of individuals acts in the same manner despite the fact that each person has different perceptions of an event (Miller & McFarland, 1987). In the bystander effect, pluralistic ignorance operates when the bystanders in an ambiguous emergency situation look around and see each other doing nothing; they assume that the others are thinking that the situation is not an emergency (Miller & McFarland, 1987). In essence, the collective inaction of the bystanders leads to a redefinition of the situation as a nonemergency.

Latané and Darley (1968) provided evidence for this explanation. Subjects filled out a questionnaire alone in a room, with two passive bystanders (confederates of the experimenter) or with two other actual subjects. While the subjects were filling out the questionnaire, smoke was introduced into the room through a vent. The results showed that when subjects were alone in the room, 75% of the subjects reported the smoke, many within 2 minutes of first noticing it. In the condition in which the subject was in the room with two passive bystanders, only 10% reported the smoke. In the last condition, in which the subject was with two other subjects, 38% reported the smoke. Thus, the presence of bystanders once again suppressed helping. This occurred despite the fact that subjects in the bystander conditions denied that the other people in the room had any effect on them.

In post-experimental interviews, Latané and Darley (1968) searched for the underlying cause for the observed results. They found that subjects who reported the smoke felt that the smoke was unusual enough to report, although they didnʼt feel that the smoke was dangerous. Subjects who failed to report the smoke, which was most likely to occur in the two-bystander condition, developed a set of creative reasons why the smoke should not be reported. For example, some subjects believed that the smoke was smog piped into the room to simulate an urban environment, or that the smoke was truth gas designed to make them answer the questionnaire truthfully. Whatever reasons these subjects came up with, the situation was redefined as a nonemergency.

Is diffusion of responsibility, dependent on the number of bystanders present, always the underlying cause for the bystander effect? Although diffusion of responsibility is the most widely accepted explanation, it is not the only explanation. Levine (1999) suggests that there are situations in which diffusion of responsibility based on the presence of bystanders cannot explain nonintervention. Instead, Levine suggests that if a bystander assumes that a social category relationship exists between parties in a potential helping situation, intervention is unlikely. A social category relationship is one in which bystanders assume that the parties involved belong together in some way. For example, a spousal relationship would fit this definition because the two individuals are seen as belonging together in the relationship. Levine argues that when we are confronted with a situation in which a social category relationship exists or is assumed, a social norm of nonintervention is activated. In short, we are socialized to keep our noses out of family matters. In fact, there is research that shows that bystanders are less willing to intervene in an emergency situation when a social category relationship exists (Shotland & Straw, 1976). Shotland and Straw, for example, found that 65% of participants were willing to intervene in an argument between a male and female who were strangers, but only 19% were willing to intervene when the male and female were said to be married.

Levine (1999) provides further evidence for this effect. He analyzed the trial transcript of the trial of two 10-year-old boys who murdered a 2-year-old child in London in 1993 (we briefly described this crime earlier in this chapter). The two older boys, Jon Thompson and Robert Venables, abducted James Bulger and walked Bulger around London for over 2 hours. During this time, the trio of boys encountered 38 witnesses. Some witnesses were alone, whereas others were with other bystanders. In a situation reminiscent of the Kitty Genovese murder, none of the 38 witnesses intervened. Based on his analysis of the trial transcript, Levine concluded that the nonintervention had little or nothing to do with the number of bystanders present, or diffusion of responsibility. Instead, statements of witnesses during trial testimony indicated that the witnesses assumed (or were told by the older boys) that the older boys were Bulgerʼs brothers taking him home. According to Levine, the assumption that a social category relationship existed among the boys was the best explanation for why the 38 witnesses did not intervene.

As a final note, we need to understand that category relationships can extend beyond social categories. We may assume that a relationship exists between people and objects. For example, imagine you are going to your car after work and see another car parked next to yours. You see that the hood is open and there is someone tinkering with something under the hood. What would you think is going on? Most likely you would assume that the person tinkering under the hood owns the car and is fixing something. You would then be surprised to learn the next day that the car was stolen and the man tinkering under the hood was a thief! Assuming that such relationships exist can be a powerful suppressant to intervention.

social category relationship A relationship in which bystanders assume that the parties involved belong together in some way.

416

Figure 11.4 Bystanders who are alone are likely

to help in high and low danger situations. The presence of another bystander increased helping in the high danger but not low danger situation; a clear reversal of the usual bystander effect.

Social Psychology

Limits to the Bystander Effect

Increasing the number of bystanders does not always suppress helping; there are exceptions to the bystander effect. The bystander effect does not hold when intervention is required in a potentially dangerous situation (Fischer, Greitemeir, Pollozek, & Frey, 2006). In this experiment participants watched what they believed was a live interaction between a male and female (actually the participants viewed a prerecorded videotape). In the high-potential-danger condition, the male was shown to be a large, “thug-like” individual who made progressively more aggressive sexual advances toward the female, culminating in sexually aggressive touching of the female and the female crying for help. At that point the tape went blank. In the low-potential-danger condition, the male was shown as a thin, short male who engaged in the same sexually aggressive behavior with the same victim reactions. Half of the participants watched the interaction alone (no bystander) and the other half watched it in the presence of a confederate of the experimenter (bystander). The experimenters measured whether the participant tried to help the female in distress. As shown in Figure 11.4, the bystander effect was replicated in the low-danger situation: Fewer participants attempt to help when a bystander is present than when the participant is alone. In the high-danger situation, however, the bystander effect was not evident.

In another experiment, a reversal of the typical bystander effect was shown with a potentially dangerous helping situation. One group of researchers staged a rape on a college campus and measured how many subjects intervened (Harari, Harari, & White, 1985). The subjects had three options in the experimental situation: fleeing without helping, giving indirect help (alerting a police officer who is out of view of the rape), or giving direct help (intervening directly in the rape).

Male subjects were tested as they walked either alone or in groups. (The groups in this experiment were simply subjects who happened to be walking together and not interacting with one another.) As the subjects approached a certain point, two actors staged the rape. The woman screamed, “Help! Help! Please help me! You bastard! Rape! Rape!” (Harari et al., 1985, p. 656). The results of this experiment did not support the

Bystander Condition

Deviant Behavior

Based on data from Checkroun and Brauer (2002).