Bystander Effect

The bystander effect is an occurrence which can happen at any time and in any place. The definition is "… [a] social psychological phenomenon ... in which individuals do not offer any means of help … when other people are present." Although people can be helpful, the bystander effect is caused by social pressures such as: diffusion of responsibility, informational social influence, and evaluation apprehension which can make a lot of people unhelpful.

Diffusion in responsibility is the decrease in the responsibility of help. In the late 1960's, Social Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley conducted a series of experiments on the bystander effects. One experiment titled, Where There's Smoke There's Fire, tested two groups of subjects. One group tested a single subject in a room, and the other tested a single subject again, yet with non-reactive actors. As the test room filled with smoke, reports show that 75% of the group with single subjects,"... left the room to report it", while the group using actors showed only 38% of "naïve" subjects reported it. These reports reveal how often people feel the need to help (or to not help), depending on the amount of people around them.

To show this, Latane and Darley conducted another experiment where the experimenter faked a serious-sounding fall behind a curtain in the test room. "70% of alone subjects reacted, but only 7% of those with [actors] reacted," reports from the experiment show. The group that tested 7% had actors whom were described as "passive", so when the majority of those test subjects reacted passively as well since those around them were too. Passiveness during emergencies can discourage the victim from getting immediate help, especially when most witnesses are reacting this