Article Review: Bystander Effect

Kevin Okonkwo

November 3, 2015

Professor Schoenfeld

PSY 150-009

Article Review: Bystander Effect

        “To Help or Not to Help”, an article authored by Darley J. M. and Latané B., discusses and analyzes the social psychology of the bystander effect. This phenomenon was initially exposed through the tragic case of Kitty Genovese who, in 1964, did not receive any help while she was brutally assaulted by a knife for thirty five minutes and died as a result. These researchers created an experiment to study and analyzed the specific components and mechanisms which are involved in producing the bystander effect. They proposed that the probability of whether or not an individual will assume personal responsibility to help in an emergency situation is inversely related to the perceived number of people, bystanders, present at the time. They describe this trend as a diffusion of responsibility and the significance of these results were translated into real world benefits, especially after one learns about the bystander effect and realized not to assume that someone else will take action first.

The independent variable of the experiment was the subjects’ perceived number of students on the intercom system. Each group was told that they were in communication with a varied number of individuals, thus providing a spectrum of results which could be compared relative to one another. The dependent variable is the amount of time it took the subject to take action to get help for the seizure victim. The researchers are hypothesizing that the more people the subject perceives to be involved in the awareness of the emergency the more likelihood of the subject relinquishing partial or full responsibility of taking action proactively. They expected that the results of the experiment would follow the same trend of what happened during the Kitty Genovese assault. As a result of there being so many bystanders, the response to call for aid was significantly delayed. For evident reasons, it is difficult to recreate the sort of emergency Kitty Genovese experienced. However, the researchers circumnavigated the challenge by duplicating the same mechanism through simple exercises of deception and perception. The subjects belong to a psychology class at New York University and were told by the researchers to discuss their experiences adjusting to the college environment. Consequently, the students were under the impression that there were only being studied in terms of their distresses, struggles and personal problems.

In order to examine the clever mechanism of how response time to help in the event of a perceived real emergency works, I will briefly describe the experiment that the researchers constructed. They set up three separate groups, 1, 2, and 3, respectively. In group 1, the individual perceived to be having a one-on-one conversation with a student expressing the obstacles and distresses of adjusting to college. In group 2, the subject perceived 2 others to be on the intercom system, and in group 3 the subject perceived 5 others in separate rooms on the intercom. However, the voices they were listening and responding to were recorded tapes. Group 1 subjects responded immediately after listening to the tape, whereas the other two did not. The emergency component of the experiment was that the response of the tape included the perceived student experiencing a seizure during the conversation. The dialogue was transcribed by the researchers and the tapes were standardized for all the subjects of the experiment.