The bystander effect is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases where individuals do not offer any means of help in an emergency situation to the victim when other people are present. The probability of help has in the past been thought to be inversely related to the number of bystanders; in other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. The mere presence of other bystanders greatly decreases intervention. This happens because as the number of bystanders increases, any given bystander is less likely to interpret the incident as a problem, and less likely to assume responsibility for taking action.
You likely witness the bystander effect quite frequently. Most situations are not serious, such as someone dropping their books in the middle of a crowded Coffman while dozens of people walk by doing nothing. However, sometimes the bystander effect can cause more serious problems. In every CPR course I've ever taken, the instructor stressed how important it is to designate a specific person in the crowd to call 911. This is because due to the bystander effect, in large crowds, no one feels the need to take responsibility because they rely on others to do so.
I'm curious about from which the Bystander Effect results. By the way, I believe that the Bystander Effect really happens around my daily life. I have watched a news that there was an old lady knocked down by a car in a downtown of one city and the lady could not stand up by herself. However, there had been no people helping that lady for 30 minutes until a policeman came.
I think this is a pretty interesting phenomenon. It seems so counterintuitive that more people would actually make it less likely that someone would help. Yet, I've witnessed this effect before. Someone was clearly lost on campus, and yet I walked right on by, assuming that someone else would help them.
Our society has taught people to become individuals, strive for independence and stay out of other people's business. Unfortunately, this is also probably a big reason why the bystander effect is such a common issue. The book talks about how individualistic societies, like the U.S., are predisposed to this effect, but that more social societies, like in many Asian countries, are more resistant to this. This may be an attempt by the authors to make us students more aware of the problem and that we as individuals need to be the ones stepping up, but I know of specific incidents in Asian countries, such as a 3 year old girl that was hit by a car, she laid in the street with hundreds of people walked by and didn't do anything, including the car that hit her.
I once heard of a study that compared the number of people that stopped and helped a car that had pulled over and was smoking. On busy highways almost no one stopped but on secluded country roads people were much more likely to stop and lend a hand.
A year ago something very much like this happened to me - I had slid off of an icy road late at night in February. I was coming home from my mom's boyfriend's house out in the Wisconsin back-country after babysitting his kids. Anyway, I panicked because I couldn't get out of the ditch, but thankfully, within the first fifteen minutes of being stuck a woman drove by and asked if I needed help. She went home, got shovels, and then came back and helped dig me out. I don't know if a stranger would've been so keen to help me if I had been on a busier highway where people would possibly have just assumed someone else would help.
This topic is fascinating, especially the example given in the book of the woman who was murdered while people were watching who had thought that someone would have already called the police by now. We'd all like to think that we would be the person to step up and help, but we may act differently when we're in situations where someone needs some form of help.