Bystander Effect Case Study

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Recommended: Limitations to the bystander effect

The Bystander effect can commonly be described as a social situation by individuals that do not offer any form of assistance in an emergency situation especially in the presence of others as shown in the Kitty Genovese and Johnathan Bugles Case. Scientist Bibb Latane and John Darley theory have been widely discussed by many of individuals. We will be looking at a few of the experiments they conducted to form this conclusion.
During the summer of 1964 an American women by the name of Kitty Genovese made headline news. She had been stabbed to death outside her residence in Queens Kew Gardens, New York. In 1960 murders in New York were common, they were very rarely report in the news paper. However the story of an attack on a young women …show more content…

The murder of James Bulger has been linked to the murder of Kitty Genovese a mere 30 years earlier. In February 1993, James Bulger was abducted from a crowded shopping mall in Strand, Merseyside United States. What made the story more shocking was the fact that this heinous crime was not done by adults, it was done by two 10 year old boys. The two boys lead the toddler through the suburbs of Bootle and Walton for over two hours, before killing him near a isolated railway track. As in the Genovese attack, there were 38 witnesses brought to court for the case of James Bulger, who had each seen the three boys Jon Venables, Robert Thompson and James Bulger that day in Liverpool. It seems that the studies currently being carried out about the bystander effect seems to focus on the number of people present at each of the two murders. It is impossible to assume how individuals might react when faced with an emergency, as there might be a number of extenuating factors that play a key role in their decision making at the time, as seen in the James Bulger case. It has been suggested that all three boys were viewed as brothers, this would have had an influence on the intervention by the bystanders (Levine, 2016). Although the witnesses were not James Bulgers neighbour, it was interpreted at the time that failure to intervene was a violation of normal human behaviour, and that members of the community, walking and sharing the same streets and common

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