BYSTANDER PHENOMENON

Some years ago, a young woman was stabbed to death in New York City

while 38 of her neighbors watched and did nothing.

Shocked, the New York Times found that there had been

numerous other incidents in which people died because

bystanders failed to intervene. Bystander apathy became

a national issue. The first explanations were personalistic

in nature, postulating alienation or frustrationproduced

hostility as characteristics of those who failed

to respond. Latane and Darley (1970) suggested that

the real explanation for bystander inaction might exist

in the social forces that acted on the crowds of bystanders.

The very fact that so shocked people-that not one,

but 38 people all witnessed the event and failed to

helpmight provide the key to understanding the phenomenon.

They suggested that three psychological processes

were critical for producing bystander inaction. First was

the definition of the situation effect. Many emergencies

start as ambiguous events. The reactions of other people

then provide evidence about how the event is to be

defined. If the other witnesses do not respond to the

event as if it were an emergency, then the witness takes

this as evidence that they do not define the event as an

emergency and adopts their interpretation. This prediction

was confirmed experimentally. An individual who

sees smoke leaking into a room responds to the possibility

of danger by finding a building occupant and reporting

the incident. However, the same incident is not

reported when an individual sees the smoke in the presence

of two confederates who calmly continue to work

on their tasks (Latane & Darley, 1968). During interviews, the nonresponders did not seem sure how to

define the situation that the smoke signaled, but

seemed quite sure that it did not signal danger.

The nonresponsive confederates were intended to

simulate the natural reactions of bystanders when confronted

with an ambiguous event that might be an

emergency. Given that in our culture it is common to

display an unperturbed exterior until one interprets the

meaning of unexpected events, each person who witnesses

an event that might signal an emergency also

views other bystanders, whose apparently unperturbed

facial expressions and demeanors are read as signaling

that they think, or perhaps know, that nothing really

wrong is happening. Confirming this, the three ordinary

respondents facing the smoke tended to fail to respond.

Miller and McFarland (1987) pointed out an interesting

aspect of this effect, which they called

pluralistic ignorunce: A bystander is aware that he fails

to respond out of confusion, but does not realize that

the others are failing to respond out of confusion, that

is, does not realize that the others are failing to respond

for exactly the same reason that he or she is failing to

respond.

Persons writing about panic mobs have observed a

similar definition of the situation effect: Initially. the

crowd sits frozen in place as smoke begins to billow into

the theater, then someone yells “fire.” The crowd’s definition

of the situation shifts rapidly, and the panicked

exit begins.

In a particularly interesting replication and extension

of the definition of the situation effect, Ross and

Braband (1973) created two possible emergencies, one

signaled by a loud crash, the other by the sight of

smoke. They then conceptually replicated the initial effect;

they demonstrated that for either the smoke or the

crash, a confederate who did not act, thus signaling a

definition of the incident as no emergency, lowered the

likelihood of the other participants responding. The researchers

then paired the participant with a confederate

whom the participant believed was unsighted. The

inaction of the unsighted confederate inhibited response

rates in the situation signaled by the crash,

which could be heard, but not by the smoke, which

could only be seen. This means that in interpreting the

meaning of the confederate’s responses, the respondents

were carrying out quite complex calculations

about what the confederate could know: specifically, because

the confederate could not see the smoke, his inaction

provided no information about the meaning of

the smoke.

The tendency for others’ actions or inactions to affect

the way that an individual defines the meaning of

jointly witnessed physical events is called the definition

of the situation effect. It is highly similar to Asch’s

(1940) interpretation of conformity as not so much involving

a change in the judgment of an object as a

change in the categorization of the object, “a change

in the object of judgment.”

The second psychological process accounting for bystander

effect occurs even when it is clear that the witnessed

event is an emergency. When one knows that

many other individuals are also witnessing an emergency,

the felt responsibility for any one individual to

intervene is lessened. This is known as the diffusion of

responsibility effect. Testing for this effect, Darley and

Latane (1968) created a situation within a group of two

to six people communicating with each other over an

intercom system, in which one participant, a confederate,

slipped into a fit or seizure and called for help.

They found that 85% of the respondents who thought

they were the only one to overhear an emergency intervened,

whereas less than one third of those who

thought the emergency was overheard by four other

people intervened. Others have replicated this effect and

extended it. Bickman (1971) demonstrated that it was

not simply the number of other witnesses to the emergency

that determined helping rates, but the number

of witnesses who were available to help.

Either when deciding on the meaning of an ambiguous

event or in deciding on whether to intervene, the

presence of other people generally raises the costs of

the possible intervention behaviors. Displaying uncertainty

or confusion to others is embarrassing, and similar

feelings of embarrassment or inadequacy are risked

when a person intervenes in an emergency in front of

a witnessing crowd. These audience inhibition effects are

the third psychological process relevant to bystander

intervention, and illustrate how all three processes can

cascade to produce inhibition of responding. The postulated

processes have generally been confirmed as

causes of bystander interaction in other studies (for a

review, see Latane & Nida, 1981).

Bystander-intervention research studies the reactions

of individuals to suddenly arising, unexpected

events that may be or are emergencies. It is, therefore,

a subset of what psychologists now call prosocial behavior,

which also includes more considered acts of helping,

such as donating to charities or volunteering for

good causes. Psychologists have examined the motives

for such prosocial behaviors, and a lively experimental

exchange has developed about the existence of genuinely

altruistic motives. Developmental psychologists

have also studied the emergence of empathic concern

and prosocial behavior in children.