Bystander Effect Research Paper

The reason people just stand by and watch instead of lending a hand can be explained through the bystander effect. The bystander effect is the finding that the greater the number of bystanders who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help. In many cases where there were too many eyewitnesses, the victim is often just passed by. An example of such a case is a 22 year-old Kitty Genovese who was raped and stabbed to death in front of her apartment complex.
Most of the time, people fail to help because of the nature of the situation. In a study conducted by Bibb Latane and John Darley (1970) in the form of a seizure experiment, the results show that the number of witnesses determine whether help is offered by the research participant. In the experiment, a group of students had a discussion in individual cubicles and one of them pretended to have a seizure. 85% of the participants helped within 60 seconds when they believed that they were the only ones listening to the student having a seizure. …show more content…
Sometimes even though it is obvious that it is an emergency, people do not offer help because they feel that it is not their responsibility to do so. When there are other bystanders, some assume that even if they did not help, someone else would. Looking back to the seizure experiment, a majority of them offered assistance immediately when they thought nobody else was around as they had the responsibility to help because if they did not, the student would die. However, the same could not be said for when there were other witnesses. This condition is known as a diffusion of responsibility which is the phenomenon wherein each bystander’s sense of responsibility to help decreases as the number of witnesses increases. This is also evident in Kitty Genovese’s case as some of the witnesses who failed to report the incident claimed that it was because they assumed that someone else had already called the

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