Have you ever witnessed an emergency in public where nobody intervened to help? Someone may have collapsed in the street or experienced a severe attack, yet most people would just go about their business or simply observe the situation passively. Instinctively, we tend to think that the more people present during an emergency, the more help there is. Research on the bystander effect, however, proved the opposite to be true.
What Prompted Research into the Bystander Effect?
The murder of Kitty Genovese prompted research into the bystander effect. In 1968, a 28-year-old woman, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, was raped and murdered outside her apartment building in New York. Two weeks after her death, an article was published in the New York Times claiming that 38 people witnessed her attack, none of whom tried to save her or call the police.
According to police reports, however, several witnesses reached out to authorities. Although the article was later falsified, it had already prompted psychologists to investigate the reasons behind the inaction of witnesses during Kitty’s murder. For four decades, the case of Genovese was featured in psychology textbooks across the United States. The psychosocial theory that came to be known as the ‘bystander effect’ was also known as the “Genovese syndrome”.
Who First Studied the Genovese Syndrome?
John M. Darley and Bibb Latané were the first social psychologists to study the Genovese syndrome. In the 1960s, they conducted a series of replicable social experiments that led to a breakthrough in social psychology. Darley and Latané hypothesized that the reason nobody intervened in the Genovese murder was the diffusion of responsibility – the theory that the more people are present during an emergency, the less they feel responsible for intervening. Imagine walking in a crowded street and seeing an injured person.
Chances are you would assume someone had already called an ambulance or someone else would step in to help. Now imagine if you saw an injured person in an empty street. Chances are you would immediately call an ambulance since you would feel a greater sense of responsibility by being the only person present to help.
To test their hypothesis, Darley and Latené designed several lab experiments where they staged an emergency and explored how participants reacted in the presence of different numbers of bystanders. Although it’s impossible to reproduce the events of Genovese’s murder for experimentation purposes, they designed several experiments that simulated a similar emergency without compromising ethical standards. To observe the natural responses of participants, they did not inform them of the real aim of their study.
What Was the First Bystander Effect Experiment?
The first formal experiment on the bystander effect was the Seizure Experiment. In 1968, Darley and Latené recruited students from the University of New York under the pretext of studying how they were adjusting to university life. Participants were placed in separate rooms and asked to share their personal problems with other students through an intercom system where they would each take their turn to speak for two minutes.
The separation was explained as a means of maintaining anonymity to prevent any embarrassment. In reality, however, there was only one participant in each intercom call, the rest being prerecorded voice tapes. The real participants were divided into three groups under different experimental conditions. Students in Group 1 were told they would be talking to one person. Group 2 participants were told they were talking to two other students. Group 3 students were told there were 5 other people on the call. The control variable was that, at some point, all participants heard someone on the line having an epileptic seizure and asking for help.
Darley and Latené measured the percentage of students in each group who called for help, and the time it took them to report the emergency. They found that only 60% of Group 3 and 85% of Group 2 reported the incident, whereas all participants in Group 1 sought help. They also found that members of groups 2 and 3 took significantly more time to seek help than members of group 1. While we may assume that people fail to help out of carelessness or apathy, Darley and Latené insisted that this was not the case.
Participants who failed to help in their experiment exhibited signs of anxiety and discomfort, such as sweaty palms and trembling hands, suggesting that they weren’t unaffected by the situation. Darley and Latené concluded that there is an inverse correlation between the number of bystanders present during an emergency and their willingness to help.
