Bystander Apathy Experiment

In 1964, a 28 year old woman named Kitty Genovese was walking home at night. Just a few feet away from her home, she was chased, raped and stabbed by a man. It is argued that 38 people watched her from their windows as she screamed in pain looking for any help. By the time someone called the police it was too late. She ended up dying before Police arrived to the scene, she bled to death.

An experiment was conducted by John Darley and Bibb Latene.They hypothesized that "increased number of perceived bystanders lower the participants intervention rates." Meaning that the individual begins to create a definition of the situation based off the reactions of those around them during certain situations. It is also said that there is a sharing of guilt the greater the audience.

For the first study, Darley and Latene had individuals placed in a room filling with smoke to see how the would react on their own.

They then tested their theory further by allowing the individual to face the smoke with two other people in the room with them.

The second experiment included three different conditions. There was a 2 person conversation, 3 person conversation and a 6 person conversation. They placed an individual in a space on their own to communicate with the other participant(s) with a headset and a mic. They were given 2 minutes to discuss the topic of college. After those 2 minutes there was a fake recorded audio that played in the headsets of the person on the other end having a seizure.

The purpose of this was to see how long it took for the individuals to get help.

The results were stunning; only 31% of the participants went to look for help which means that the majority of the participants did not even bother to make an effort to help the man who was suffering a seizure. However, the critical finding of this experiment lies on the consequences of the primary treatment condition. In a one on one conversation, 85% of the individuals actually requested help. This implies that if an individual believes that they are the only one who knows about an incident, there is a higher probability that they will request help. On the contrary, when an individual was put with a group they displayed less of a reaction to the incident. This implies that an individual is less likely to request help when other individuals are present.

Two reasons were offered to explain the bystander apathy effect:

Diffusion of responsibility: this occurs when people think that another person will step in and thus, they feel less responsible.

pluralistic ignorance: this refers to the mentality that a persons help isn't needed if everyone else isn't reacting to the emergency. Seeing the passivity of others will prompt the idea that the emergency isn't that serious as compared to perception when he is alone.

I think this experiment was ethical because even though the participants were in stressful situations, the situations they were placed in were not strong enough to cause any true harm. If there was a participant that suffered psychological harm, which there wasn't, would've probably been free to discontinue participating. This experiment could not have been made possible using any other method; we would not have been able to gain this knowledge without placing the participants in these situations. Not allowing this type of experiment to be done holds back progress in psychology.

Segilia, D. (2016, April 7). The Bystander Apathy Experiment. Retrieved from https://sites.psu.edu/dps16/2016/04/07/the-bystander-apathy-experiment/

Bystander Apathy Experiment. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://explorable.com/bystander-apathy-experiment