The Bystander Effect Experiment

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Bystander effect refers to the instance in which there is an emergency and people witnessing don’t respond when there are others around witnessing the same event. This happens because of pluralistic ignorance which is when people assume that there is nothing wrong because others surrounding them don’t look concerned. Two researchers, Latan and Darley, conducted an experiment to further study the bystander effect. In this experiment, Latan and Darley took multiple college students and one at a time, put them into cubicles. In a cubicle next to them there would be a recording device producing noises emulating distress noises in the form of choking. Eighty five percent of the students went to help; this is not an alarming number. The surprising …show more content…

The first step is to notice the event or, if they are in a hurry, not notice and ignore it. The second step is to realize the emergency or, in most cases, see that nobody is reacting and assume it is not an emergency. The third is to assume responsibility, meaning to help the person in distress. You could do that or assume that somebody else will which happens in most cases. The fourth is to know what to do in the situation, for example, if someone is having a heart attack, doing CPR would be knowing what to do in that situation, or not. The fifth is to act but in most cases people do not because they are afraid to do so. If it is a dangerous situation, for example an attempted murder, people would be afraid to act because they are afraid to get hurt. They can also be afraid of embarrassment, they may not want the media coverage on them (Bystander Effect). A famous case of the bystander effect is the Kitty Genovese murder. Kitty Genovese was a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager who was killed in 1964 by a man named Winston Mosley. Kitty Genovese was by no means the first of the last woman killed by Mosley so what makes her stand out from the rest? When Kitty was killed a reported thirty-eight people witnessed her murder and not one of them did anything to help her despite hearing her two screams for help

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