Team- Gaurav Suman, Dheerendra Kumar Meena, Akshay Verma
Introduction
Wikipedia definition
of Bystander effect,"The Bystander effect, or Bystander apathy is a
social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which
individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other
people are present".[1]
The concept was
first demonstrated by two psychology researchers, John Darley and Bibb Latane in laboratory in
1968. They were researching and conducting experiments about the effect,
following the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.[2] This effect is one of
the strongest and most replicable psychological phenomenon.
Motivation
In India, there are countless incidents involving a crime/assault in public and which involve local people standing as audience, rather than helping the victim. One such incident is witnessed in Guwahati, in July 2012. A young woman was sexually assaulted in public. From the video footage and eye witness reports, it was cleat that there were many people who were in position of helping the woman but didn't helped.[3]
We chose this topic to educate people about this effect,and to understand the mentality of people about this effect and how one can avoid falling victim to this effect.
Past Studies and
surveys
Many aspects of
Bystander effect are well researched and these results are backed up
by many surveys. As to answer why this effect occurs, some
possible causes include– ambiguity, cohesiveness , diffusion of
responsibility.
Ambiguity: A person
is more likely to help a victim, if he understands the situation
quickly. As an example, suppose a person falls from a bicycle, a
passerby may overlook him, considering this situation as non-serious. However, if the person who fell from the bicycle is
shouting for help, a passerby consider this situation as an emergency
may respond fast. Thus a sense of emergency encourages people to help other people.
Cohesiveness:
Cohesiveness may be defined as established relationship between
people. This relationship may be friendship, acquaintance, etc.
According to a survey done by Mark and Simon, in 2008, cohesiveness affects how a person respond to such situations. A high cohesive group
of people is more likely to help than a low cohesive group of
people.[4]
Diffusion of
responsibility: Darley and Latane, conducted research on diffusion
of responsibility. The research suggests that, when there are more
people around in case of emergency, the people believe that someone
else will take responsibility. Thus the sense of responsibility is
diffused. This is one of the main cause of Bystander Effect.[5]
Approach:
To understand this
effect and mentality of people in such situations, we conducted a
survey in our Institute campus. 40 people participated in our survey,
out of which 38 were male participants. We conclude the following results from our survey.
Survey results
1. Cohesiveness and
membership:
The participants
were asked whether they prefer to help a person when they are alone
or when they are with their close friends.
Result 1 - Cohesiveness and membership
The result was
inconclusive, as equal number of participants prefer to help when
alone and same number of participants prefer to help in group.
However, few people change their preference of help when in group.
2. Response in
different situations.
The participants
were asked whether they prefer to save a person who is getting
sexually assaulted and/or physically assaulted and/or robbed.
Result 2 - Response in different situations
As the results show,
People are more likely help a sexual assault victim over a physical
assault victim. In this result, we see that the less ambiguous the
situation, the more likely people are to help. A physically assault
can be interpreted wrongly, but robbery and sexual assault are
clearly emergency situations.
3. Gender Biasing
Participants were
asked about whether they will preferably help a male physical assault
victim , the assaulter being a female or a female physical assault
victim, assaulter being a male.
Result 3 - Bystander Effect and gender
The result shows
that a female victim will be saved preferably over a male victim. In the graph, 12 participants responded that they will bystanders for males only. 5 participants will not help both males and females. No participant wants to be a bystander only for females. However, some responses also include that the participant want to
know the reason behind this physical beating.
4. Parental teaching to encourage helping
Finally we asked our
participants if they were encouraged to help people by their parents,
and whether they will encourage their children to help other people.
Cat 1 - Participants were encouraged to help by their parents.
Cat 2 - Participants will encourage their children to help others.
Result 4 - Parental Teaching for helping others.
The result was
favorable that more people want to encourage their children to be a
helper than a bystander.
Conclusion:
From our survey and
the materials we read, we found that, in general, people are likely
to help other people. However, under different circumstances their
responses vary from being helpful to being a bystander. Since there
were very few females who were part of this survey, so this survey
can't give genuine answer about opinions of particular gender about
this effect.
Also, this survey was conducted only on students of our Institute, so the results could have been different than the opinion of local people.
For future work on
this topic, we would like to work on educating more people about this
effect and find possible courses of actions in case of emergencies.
References:
[4] Mark Levine and Simon Crowther (2008). "The Responsive Bystander: How Social Group, Membership and Group Size can encourage as well as Inhibit Bystander Intervention." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
[5] J.M. Darley and B. Latane (1968), "Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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