In this video I discuss the bystander effect, which refers to a tendency for people to fail to act or help someone in need when in the presence of others. I begin with the famous story of Kitty Genovese, then consider experiments by John Darley and Bibb Latane demonstrating how the presence of others can inhibit action, even when one’s own safety might be at risk. Next I consider the tragic case of Wang Yue in China, a 2-year old child left in the street after being struck by 2 vehicles. Some have claimed that fears of the financial or legal costs of getting involved discourage intervention in China based on the Peng Yu incident. I describe pluralistic ignorance, which suggests that we assume others are more knowledgeable and we wait for them to act, and the diffusion of responsibility, which suggests that our sense of responsibility to help is dispersed among all members of the crowd, reducing its effect on each individual.
Darley & Latane (1968) Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty…
Latane & Darley (1969) Bystander Apathy: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/imag…
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the bystander effect and this brings us to another classic story in social psychology that is the story of Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in New York in 1964. According to newspaper accounts at the time, there were dozens of witnesses to this crime. They saw Genovese through their windows, they heard her screams for help, and yet none of them intervened, none of them even called the police. More recently there have been questions about the details of Genovese’s murder and it’s been suggested that some of the witnesses could not possibly have seen the crime from their windows. It’s even been suggested that some people actually did contact the police.
Nevertheless this story provides a vivid demonstration of what’s known as the Bystander Effect. This is a situation where people fail to act; they fail to help someone who is obviously in need of help. Unfortunately, we have other real-life examples of this bystander effect and we also have laboratory evidence supporting this idea that in some situations people fail to act. This brings us to a study by John Darley and Bibb Latane published in 1968, where participants engaged in the discussion via intercom. So the participant was alone in a room using an intercom to participate in this discussion and during the discussion they overhear another participant having a seizure. Now if the participants were led to believe that they were the only one who could hear this other person then 85% of them immediately took action. They left the room, they went to find out where is this person who’s having a seizure, and what can be done to help him. If they thought other people could also hear the seizure however, they thought that four others were listening through their intercoms, then only 31% of the participants actually went to get help, and they waited longer before doing so.
Now we might think this is just about helping others, but another study by Latane and Darley showed that we may not act even if our own safety is at risk. And this is often referred to as the “smoke–filled room study” and in this study participants came in and they were completing some forms in a room, and while they’re completing these forms they notice that smoke begins pouring out of a vent in the room. Now if the participants are alone in the room, 75% of them immediately got up to go report this smoke to someone else. If they were in a room with what they believed to be other participants, but were actually confederates and these other confederates were passive and didn’t seem to mind the smoke, didn’t get up and do anything, then only 10% of the participants left the room to go get help.
Now we also have real-life examples of people failing to act. A few years ago in China there was a great scandal over video of two-year-old Wang Yue in Foshan, China, who was run over by two different vehicles and she lay in the street for seven minutes before anyone got help. And in that time more than a dozen people walked by and unfortunately Wang Yue died from her injuries. And when we see video of these types of events we can see the truth of Eli Wiesel’s claim that “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference”.
So why don’t people act? How can people see these things occurring, they can see someone who is clearly in need of help, even a young child and yet do nothing? Well one reason for this is that there’s costs to getting involved and in some cases like witnessing a crime those costs can be very high. Your own physical safety could be put at risk, perhaps even your own life. We could also think about financial costs of getting involved and when this Wang Yue video surfaced in China many people blamed the Peng Yu incident of 2006. This is a situation where 26 year old Peng Yu helped a 65 year-old woman who fell while boarding a bus and broke her hip. And he helped bring her to the hospital and as a result of his altruistic behavior, he was accused of causing the injuries. A judge in Nanjing ruled that he wouldn’t have helped if he wasn’t responsible for what happened and Peng Yu was fined the equivalent of $6,000 for this helping behavior.
But if we think about John Darley and Bibb Latane’s studies we might realize the costs appear fairly minimal; just leaving the room and looking for someone else to get involved. So the costs don’t seem to be particularly great and the benefits seem even greater, particularly in the smoke-filled room study because your own physical safety might be at risk if there’s a fire in the building. And so you would think that the cost of walking out of the room and finding somebody to ask, or the cost of maybe the potential embarrassment of being wrong, that actually it’s nothing to worry about that seems minimal compared to the risk to your own physical safety. So what else could be involved in explaining why people don’t act well?
One explanation is what’s called pluralistic ignorance. This is the idea that in these situations we often have very little information; we don’t know very much about the cause of these events, we don’t know why there’s smoke coming out of a vent, we don’t know why someone’s laying in the street, we don’t know why someone’s screaming for help. And as a result we don’t know what the appropriate response is either. So we have very, very little information about the cause then we also have very little information about the response. And we see that there’s other people around and we assume that those other people might know more than we know. We look to them for information and we see that they aren’t acting either. We think “well, they may be saw more than I did” or “maybe they have more training, they know what to do in a medical emergency and they’re not acting” and so we get the idea that not acting must be the appropriate response. If other people know more and still don’t act then not acting is the right thing to do. And this also brings in the idea of conformity that I’ve talked about previous videos.
Another way to think about why people don’t act is the diffusion of responsibility. This is the idea that when other people are around the responsibility, the feeling that we should help gets spread out amongst the crowd. So if you’re the sole witness to an event then you feel the full weight of responsibility. So if I see a person collapse on the street and I see there’s no one else around, I know that if I don’t do something then nobody will do anything. This person won’t get help unless I provide it and so I feel the full weight of responsibility. If this same event occurs and then I look around and see that there are five or six other witnesses, well now this sense of responsibility to help is spread out. It’s diffused or dispersed amongst the crowd; we each feel a little bit of responsibility to help, we feel like we should do something, but we also feel like those other people should do something. Somebody should do something but it’s not enough sense of responsibility on each of us to stimulate us to act. So we feel a little bit of pressure that we should help but we don’t feel enough to actually do something. Whereas if we were alone we would feel the full weight of responsibility and we’d be much more likely to get involved.
In the next video we’ll take a look at situations where people actually do get involved; where they engage in acts of altruism and pro-social behavior. So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
