Darley and Latane - The Bystander

Effecthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-WvaRJdAA0

Smoke Filled Room StudyKitty Genovese

What Would You Do? - scenariosFactors of Bystander Effect

Memory of the Camps, Holocaust Bystanders - Case

Bystander Effect

• Researchers Bibb Latane and John Darley found that the amount of time it takes the participant to take action and seek help varies depending on how many other observers are around.  

• In a typical experiment, the participant is either alone or among a group of other participants or confederates. An emergency situation is staged and researchers measure how long it takes the participants to intervene, if they intervene. These experiments have found that the presence of others inhibits helping.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybpg_B9S_q0#t=179

Bystander Effect:

• Bystander – person who is not an active participant in a situation – they are standing by and witnessing

• The most frequently cited examples of the Bystander Effect are:• 1. The Smoke Filled Room Study• 2. The brutal murder of a young woman

named Catherine "Kitty" Genovese.

Smoke Filled Room Study

• People respond slower (or not at all) to emergency situations in the presence of others who are passive.

• Imagine that you are in a room all alone filling out a questionnaire, and smoke starts coming from under the door.  What do you do?  If you are like most sane people, you get out... or at least tell someone in charge, and you do this without hesitation.  Now imagine the same situation, except that you are not alone, you are with several other people who don't seem to care about the smoke.  What do you do now?

• http://www.sociallypsyched.org/item/the-smoke-filled-room

The Case of Kitty Genovese

On Friday, March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Genovese was returning home from work. As she approached her apartment entrance in New York City, she was attacked and stabbed by a man later identified as Winston Moseley.

Despite Genovese’s repeated calls for help, none of the dozen or so people in the nearby apartment building who heard her cries called police to report the incident. The attack first began at 3:20 AM, but it was not until 3:50 AM that someone first contacted police.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdpdUbW8vbw

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JozmWS6xYEw

What Would You Do?Look at these examples…

Child Abducted in Public: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIvGIwLcIuw&feature=related

Waitresses Harassed in Restaurant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euXzkLZQPRY

Deaf Girl Discriminated Applying for Job http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqI1d4rLWSM

Helping the Homeless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaKF3_FwJ3w

What are the factors that people say motivated them to help or not help when they are bystanders in a situation?

Factors of Bystander Effect

DID ACT (ACTORS):

DID NOT ACT (BYSTANDER):

Factors that Cause People to Become Actors

• Morals – parents taught you the right thing to do – i.e. damaging someone’s property

• Damage done in their community

• Fear – don’t want to get in trouble for not helping

• Personal – if you were in that situation, you would want help

• Stereotypes – racial profiling, gender, age

• Pressure from others - conformity

Factors that Cause People to Remain Bystanders

• Fear – personal safety, mistake (hurting someone…, judgment)

• “not my business” – i.e. conflict in a family

• Lack information on the situation

• Don’t know people involved

• Assume someone else will do it – diffusion of responsibility

• Inconvenient – busy, don’t want to get involved, don’t have time…

Factors of the Bystander Effect

Theory by Bibb Latane and John Darley

4 years after Genovese was murdered, two psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane, wanted to identify the factors

that influence bystanders’ decisions to get involved in public situations

Factors of the Bystander Effect

Diffusion of Responsibility = the more people in the group, the less likely individuals are to act b/c they think that the responsibility rests with all other bystanders as opposed to when they are the only ones witnessing the situation• (If there are 100 people in a group, each person bear 1% of

the responsibility, if there are 2 people, they each bear 50%)

Pluralistic Ignorance = is a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume that most others accept it, and therefore go along with it. • (When a teacher asks a class 'Any questions?' there will

often be a deafening silence, even if nobody understands).

Factors of the Bystander Effect

Ambiguous (uncertain/unsure) Situations – Having more than one possible meaning not expressed or understood clearly When alone, a person is responsible for deciding how to respond appropriately to a situation. But when there are others present, we look to them for how to behave (i.e. help or not)• Case of Matthew Carrington: http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt_ZtfhQ094

Understanding Environment = has to do with their familiarity of the environment where the emergency occurs. If the bystander is familiar with the environment, they are more likely to know where to get help, where the exits are, etc. Bystanders who are in an environment in which they are not familiar with the surroundings are less likely to give help in an emergency situation.

Factors of the Bystander Effect

Similarities = Research based on altruism (selflessness) found that a bystander was more inclined to help the person in distress, if there was something in common between them• (such as being the same gender or being football

fans, and the victim is wearing a football jersey)

Cost-Benefit Analysis = Evaluating the consequences of helping - consider costs of helping (e.g. effort, potential harm) and benefits of helping (e.g. social approval, self-esteem).

Real Life Application - Case Study

Holocaust

Extreme Case of Bystander Effect – THE HOLOCAUST

• On a list of the top 10 most notorious cases of bystander effect, the Holocaust rates #1.

• Read the following:

• The most repugnant, globally violent disgrace of the reputation of humanity gave rise to the equally infamous use of the phrase “diffusion of responsibility,” as the Nazi officers tried at Nuremberg all claimed the same defense, “We were just following orders.” They argued that if the Holocaust really was as bad as journalists were saying, then someone else must surely have known of it, and thus it was not necessarily their responsibility to report it to the authorities.

• They also argued that the only authorities in Continental Europe at the time were German, and thus, they would only have killed themselves by attempting to inform the outside world, and would have accomplished nothing. This is not true. Most of the German population knew nothing of it, but had they, they could easily have banded together and demanded that the Holocaust be stopped. The Nazis would have been reluctant to exterminate their own “master race,” and by that point, the Allies would have heard news of it. So the Nazis wisely concealed the concentration and death camps from all but the small villages nearest to them

• The Holocaust achieves #1, however, because the populations of the villages near these camps, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbruck, to name a few, knew perfectly well of the atrocities and horror inside the camps. The camps were established near fairly large towns and cities, the inhabitants of which could not have ignored the stench coming from them. Allied soldiers all reported smelling camps before finding them, from as far as 20 miles if the wind blew right.

• The Allies accused the German citizens of these towns of knowing full well what was happening to Jews and other “undesirables” and yet making no effort to save one life. These German populations were thus forced to clean up the emaciated corpses and bury them in mass graves, as punishment for their passivity.

QUESTION: What reasons did the Nazi’s give for “standing

by”?

Memory of the Camps – Bergen Concentration Camp

• Holocaust Survivor Speak Against Bullying Bystanders• http://

www.didsburyreview.ca/article/20121106/DID0801/311069963/0/did

• Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp• http

://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/50000-deaths-at-bergen-belsen-but-only-6851-death-certificates-issued/  

Extreme Example of Bystander Effect

• The Holocaust – Memory of the Camps• Identifies atrocities of the camps• Places blame on bystanders by camp

liberators

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0px38Cwo4

• Watch (13:30-21:00)

• This is a VERY graphic film.