Bystander Help

by Deloris in Psychology, August 5, 2009

The truth about bystanders helping might surprise you.

Deloris Kinnaird, 2009

Help comes in many ways and happens for various reasons. There are many times when people want to help but are unsure what to do or how it will be accepted. People’s willingness to help someone during a chance encounter on a city street varies considerably around the world (Levine, 2003). Levine with some of his students in 1990 traveled across the United States visiting 36 cities of various sizes to observe where passersby are most likely to aid a stranger. In this particular experiment New York came out dead last—36th out of 36. Overall, they found that people in small and medium-sized cities in the Southeast were the most helpful and those residents of large Northeastern and West Coast cities were the least (Levine, 2003).

The murder of Kitty Genovese as described in Latane and Darley’s 1968 article, Group Inhibition of Bystander Intervention, brought about the phrase “bystander help”. Basically what happened was thirty-eight people, all residing in the same neighborhood, stood by and allowed a woman’s life to be taken from her. One person was said to have yelled to the attacker to leave Kitty alone, but never made any threats of calling the police. It’s hard to contemplate that 38 people would not intervene while a woman was sesxually assaulted and stabbed over and over again. The findings demonstrated that both the presence of others and situational factors (such as time restrictions) greatly impact the amount of responsibility a person feels (“Bystander Effect“, n.d.).The most common explanation of this phenomenon is that, with others present, observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so they each individually refrain from doing so (“Bystander intervention“, n.d.). People may also assume that other bystanders may be more qualified to help, such as being a doctor or police officer, and their intervention would thus be unneeded. Another explanation is that bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene (“Bystander intervention“, n.d). Since others are doing exactly the same, everyone concludes from the inaction of others that other people do not think that help is needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance and social proof (“Bystander intervention“, n.d.). Pluralistic ignorance refers to the state in which people mistakenly believe that their own thoughts and feelings are different from those of others, even though everyone’s behavior is the same (Brehm, Kassin, & Fein, 1999).