The Bystander Effect

The Bystander Effect The bystander effect is detrimental to the health of American citizen’s experiencing a public emergency. This phenomenon occurs when a large group of people witness a crisis happening but fail to acknowledge or help the victim. Bystanders of events move through five mental stages when deciding whether to provide aid or simply move on. These 5 stages include “noticing an event is taking place, identifying the event as an emergency, deciding if they want to take responsibility of the situation, making a mental decision on how to respond, and actually following through and applying their decision.” (Prevos, 2014) All of the causes of the bystander effect are mental choices. One of the most significant mental outcomes is

This is considered low danger because nobody has to get hurt if they just cooperate or keep walking by. A lady may get her purse stolen but doesn’t get hurt in any way other than emotionally. If a bystander were to intervene the situation may elevate to something unexpected and dangerous. Instead they just ignore what is happening to prevent further damage. An extreme example of a high danger emergency would be the terrorist strike of September 11th. Everyone on the plane knew something terrible and wrong was going to happen so they banded together to try and stop the hijackers. The citizens on the ground around the building witnessed the strike and even though they were shocked, assisted the emergency responders. Sometimes the success and mental reward of helping can outweigh the risk of

“Only about 2.5% of people facing a medical emergency in public received help from strangers.” (Cornwell, 2016) That is a shockingly low percent given the fact that just talking to a victim is enough to be considered help. Many people do not offer assistance because they think they need official training, such as CPR. “Since CPR requires intimate contact with the victim, as well some degree of training, the researchers expected the response rates for more mundane emergencies to be higher. Instead, it was lower” (Schumaker, 2016). Minorities have an even lower chance of receiving help from a bystander, African Americans especially. According to Schumaker “Just 1.8% of black people received emergency aid from bystanders”. This is mostly due to the fact that some people are still afraid of African Americans. One study revealed that “50 percent of white medical students and residents believed false facts about biological differences between white and black patients”. (Schumaker, 2016) Putting an end to these racial fears could significantly improve the medical relationship between