Bystander effect

Emergency versus non-emergency situations

Latané and Darley performed three experiments to test bystander behavior in non-emergency situations.^[8] Their results indicated that the way in which the subjects were asked for help mattered. In one condition, subjects asked a bystander for his or her name. More people provided an answer when the students gave their name first. In another condition, the students asked bystanders for a dime. When the student gave an explanation, such as saying that their wallet had been stolen, the percentage of people giving assistance was higher (72%) than when the student just asked for a dime (34%). Additional research by Faul, Mark, et al., using data collected by EMS officials when responding to an emergency, indicated that the response of bystanders was correlated with the health severity of the situation.^[9]

According to Latané and Darley, there are five characteristics of emergencies that affect bystanders:^[8]

1. Emergencies involve threat of harm or actual harm
2. Emergencies are unusual and rare
3. The type of action required in an emergency differs from situation to situation
4. Emergencies cannot be predicted or expected
5. Emergencies require immediate action

Due to these five characteristics, bystanders go through cognitive and behavioural processes:

1. Notice that something is going on
2. Interpret the situation as being an emergency
3. Degree of responsibility felt
4. Form of assistance
5. Implement the action choice

Notice: To test the concept of "noticing", Latane and Darley (1968) staged an emergency using Columbia University students. The students were placed in a room—either alone, with two strangers or with three strangers to complete a questionnaire while they waited for the experimenter to return. While they were completing the questionnaire, smoke was pumped into the room through a wall vent to simulate an emergency. When students were working alone they noticed the smoke almost immediately (within 5 seconds). However, students that were working in groups took longer (up to 20 seconds) to notice the smoke. Latané and Darley claimed this phenomenon could be explained by the social norm of what is considered polite etiquette in public. In most western cultures, politeness dictates that it is inappropriate to idly look around. This may indicate that a person is nosy or rude. As a result, passers-by are more likely to be keeping their attention to themselves when around large groups than when alone. People who are alone are more likely to be conscious of their surroundings and therefore more likely to notice a person in need of assistance.

Interpret: Once a situation has been noticed, a bystander may be encouraged to intervene if they interpret the incident as an emergency. According to the principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. If it is determined that others are not reacting to the situation, bystanders will interpret the situation as not an emergency and will not intervene. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof. Referring to the smoke experiment, even though students in the groups had clearly noticed the smoke which had become so thick that it was obscuring their vision, irritating their eyes or causing them to cough, they were still unlikely to report it. Only one participant in the group condition reported the smoke within the first four minutes, and by the end of the experiment, no-one from five of eight groups had reported the smoke at all. In the groups that did not report the smoke, the interpretations of its cause, and the likelihood that it was genuinely threatening was also less serious, with no-one suggesting fire as a possible cause, but some preferring less serious explanations, such as the air-conditioner was leaking.^[10] Similarly, interpretations of the context played an important role in people's reactions to a man and woman fighting in the street. When the woman yelled, "Get away from me; I don't know you," bystanders intervened 65 percent of the time, but only 19 percent of the time when the woman yelled, "Get away from me; I don't know why I ever married you."^[7]

General bystander effect research was mainly conducted in the context of non-dangerous, non-violent emergencies. A study (2006) tested bystander effect in emergency situations to see if they would get the same results from other studies testing non-emergencies. In situations with low potential danger, significantly more help was given when the person was alone than when they were around another person. However, in situations with high potential danger, participants confronted with an emergency alone or in the presence of another person were similarly likely to help the victim.^[11] This suggests that in situations of greater seriousness, it is more likely that people will interpret the situation as one in which help is needed and will be more likely to intervene.

Degree of responsibility: Darley and Latané determined that the degree of responsibility a bystander feels is dependent on three things:

1. Whether or not they feel the person is deserving of help
2. The competence of the bystander
3. The relationship between the bystander and the victim

Forms of assistance: There are two categories of assistance as defined by Latané and Darley:

1. Direct intervention: directly assisting the victim
2. Detour intervention. Detour intervention refers to reporting an emergency to the authorities (i.e. the police, fire department)

Implementation: After going through steps 1–4, the bystander must implement the action of choice.

In one study done by Abraham S. Ross, the effects of increased responsibility on bystander intervention were studied by increasing the presence of children. This study was based on the reaction of 36 male undergraduates presented with emergency situations. The prediction was that the intervention would be at its peak due to presence of children around those 36 male undergraduate participants. This was experimented and showed that the prediction was not supported, and was concluded as "the type of study did not result in significant differences in intervention."^[12]

A meta-analysis (2011) of the bystander effect^[13] reported that "The bystander effect was attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous (compared with non-dangerous), perpetrators were present (compared with non-present), and the costs of intervention were physical (compared with non-physical). This pattern of findings is consistent with the arousal-cost-reward model, which proposes that dangerous emergencies are recognized faster and more clearly as real emergencies, thereby inducing higher levels of arousal and hence more helping." They also "identified situations where bystanders provide welcome physical support for the potentially intervening individual and thus reduce the bystander effect, such as when the bystanders were exclusively male, when they were naive rather than passive confederates or only virtually present persons, and when the bystanders were not strangers."

An alternative explanation has been proposed by Stanley Milgram, who hypothesized that the bystanders' callous behavior was caused by the strategies they had adopted in daily life to cope with information overload. This idea has been supported to varying degrees by empirical research.^[14]

Timothy Hart and Ternace Miethe used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and found that a bystander was present in 65 percent of the violent victimizations in the data. Their presence was most common in cases of physical assaults (68%), which accounted for the majority of these violent victimizations and less likely in robberies (49%) and sexual assaults (28%). The actions of bystanders were most frequently judged by victims as "neither helping nor hurting" (48%), followed by "helping" (37%), "hurting" (10%), and "both helping and hurting" (3%). Half of the attacks in which a bystander was present occurred in the evening, where the victim and bystander were strangers.^[15]

Ambiguity and consequences

Ambiguity is one factor that affects whether or not a person assists another in need. In some cases of high ambiguity, it can take a person or group up to five times as long before taking action than in cases of low ambiguity. In these cases, bystanders determine their own safety before proceeding. Bystanders are more likely to intervene in low ambiguity, insignificant consequence situations than in high ambiguity, significant consequence situations.

Latané and Rodin (1969) suggested that in ambiguous situations, bystanders may look to one another for guidance, and misinterpret others' lack of initial response as a lack of concern. This causes each bystander to decide that the situation is not serious.^[7]

Understanding of environment

Whether or not a bystander intervenes may have 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.^[8] 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.

Priming the bystander effect

Research done by Garcia et al. (2002) indicate that priming a social context may inhibit helping behavior.^[16] Imagining being around one other person or being around a group of people can affect a person's willingness to help.

Cohesiveness and group membership

Group cohesiveness is another variable that can affect the helping behaviour of a bystander. As defined by Rutkowski et al., cohesiveness refers to an established relationship (friends, acquaintances) between two or more people.^[17] Experiments have been done to test the performance of bystanders when they are in groups with people they have been acquainted with. According to Rutkowski et al., the social responsibility norm affects helping behavior. The norm of social responsibility states that "people should help others who are in need of help and who are dependent on them for it." As suggested by the research, the more cohesive a group, the more likely the group will act in accordance to the social responsibility norm. To test this hypothesis, researchers used undergraduate students and divided them into four groups: a low cohesive group with two people, a low cohesive group with four people, a high cohesive group with two people, and a high cohesive group with four people. Students in the high cohesive group were then acquainted with each other by introducing themselves and discussing what they liked/disliked about school and other similar topics. The point of the experiment was to determine whether or not high cohesive groups were more willing to help a hurt "victim" than the low cohesive groups. The four member high cohesive groups were the quickest and most likely groups to respond to the victim who they believed to be hurt. The four member low cohesive groups were the slowest and least likely to respond to the victim.

Altruism research suggests that helping behaviour is more likely when there are similarities between the helper and the person being helped. Recent research has considered the role of similarity, and more specifically, shared group membership, in encouraging bystander intervention. In one experiment (2005), researchers found that bystanders were more likely to help an injured person if that person was wearing a football jersey of a team the bystander liked as opposed to a team the bystander did not like. However, when their shared identity as football fans was made salient, supporters of both teams were likely to be helped, significantly more so than a person wearing a plain shirt.^[18]

The findings of Mark Levine and Simon Crowther (2008) illustrated that increasing group size inhibited intervention in a street violence scenario when bystanders were strangers, but encouraged intervention when bystanders were friends. They also found that when gender identity is salient, group size encouraged intervention when bystanders and victims shared social category membership. In addition, group size interacted with context-specific norms that both inhibit and encourage helping. The bystander effect is not a generic consequence of increasing group size. When bystanders share group-level psychological relationships, group size can encourage as well as inhibit helping.^[19]

These findings can be explained in terms of self-categorization and empathy. From the perspective of self-categorization theory, a person's own social identity, well-being is tied to their group membership so that when a group based identity is salient, the suffering of one group member can be considered to directly affect the group. Because of this shared identity, referred to as self-other merging, bystanders are able to empathize, which has been found to predict helping behaviour. For example, in a study relating to helping after eviction both social identification and empathy were found to predict helping. However, when social identification was controlled for, empathy no longer predicted helping behaviour.^[20]

Cultural differences

In discussing the case of Wang Yue and a later incident in China, in which CCTV footage from a Shanghai subway showed passengers fleeing from a foreigner who fainted, UCLA anthropologist Yunxiang Yan said that the reactions can be explained not only by previous reports of scamming from older people for helping, but also by historical cultural differences in Chinese agrarian society, in which there was a stark contrast between how individuals associated with ingroup and outgroup members, saying, "How to treat strangers nicely is one of the biggest challenges in contemporary Chinese society...The prevailing ethical system in traditional China is based on close-knit community ties, kinship ties." He continued, "A person might treat other people in the person's social group very, very nicely... But turn around, when facing to a stranger, and (a person might) tend to be very suspicious. And whenever possible, might take advantage of that stranger." In spite of this, Yan thought Chinese society was moving to a more positive direction, with the younger generation having more inclusive values as a result of growing up in a more globalized society.^[21]

In India, the phenomena of bystanders failing to help after witnessing violent incidents have also been partly attributed to culture. Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy contended it was due to the "increasing brutalisation of our society" which resulted from "rapid cultural change and the change in education standards".^[22] According to psychologist Devika Kapoor, the bystander effect in India "seems more pronounced because of our cultural conditioning. We're often told to mind our own business as young kids and not ask questions. This then carries into our adult lives too, where we choose to isolate ourselves from situations that don't concern us."^[23]

Diffusion of responsibility

Darley and Latané (1968) conducted research on diffusion of responsibility.^[24] The findings suggest that in the case of an emergency, when people believe that there are other people around, they are less likely or slower to help a victim because they believe someone else will take responsibility. People may also fail to take responsibility for a situation depending on the context. They may assume that other bystanders are more qualified to help, such as doctors or police officers, and that their intervention would be unneeded. They may also be afraid of being superseded by a superior helper, offering unwanted assistance, or facing the legal consequences of offering inferior and possibly dangerous assistance. For this reason, some legislations, such as "Good Samaritan Laws" limit liability for those attempting to provide medical services and non-medical services in an emergency.