The Bystander Effect

In class, we were presented with a situation in which an onlooker or onlooker have ran into a situation in which they are forced to either help or ignore. This was my response:
      In my opinion, the likelihood of an onlooker helping in this situation is 3, likely, because there are two people against one and that isn't very fair. But, we don't know who these onlookers are and if they are even decent enough to help in that situation. Five factors that would influence an onlooker to help is if they are a good person who believes in fairness, if they felt the need to help, if the man being cornered could be in danger, if they know the man, or if they know the men cornering the other man. Five factors that would influence an onlooker to not help is if they just want to watch, if they don't care, if they're drunk, if they just want to go home, or if they assumed that the man being cornered caused this mess.

   The Bystander Effect 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. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders. This implies that the age old thought of safety in numbers may not be entirely true. A bystander is often referred to as a conformist in that they are conforming to the group in not helping someone in need. This is because when a bystander sees someone in need or notices strange behavior, they look around to see if anyone else sees the behavior as weird. The bystander wants to know what the group thinks or what others in society perceive this as. If the bystander does not see anyone reacting to the situation then they will feel compelled to do the same and simply ignore the situation. Because of this, it is shown that a bystander is a conformist. The Kitty Genovese case is what opened my eyes to The Bystander Effect, as 38 people witnessed a murder go on for more than half an hour and did nothing to help her. On March 27, 1964, Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was stabbed three times throughout the course of half an hour as many neighbors witnessed and did practically nothing to help her. She screamed three times in total, and even though many lights went on in apartments, little to no one actually helped. Even before Kitty was stabbed, the killer grabbed her and she screamed for the first time, alerting many in the building. The first time Kitty was stabbed, she screamed again and even stated that she had been stabbed, but the most anyone did was turn on their lights, look out their window, and one man yelled at the killer to leave the girl alone. The killer shrugged and walked off, and just like that, all the lights went off and everyone ignored the fact that Kitty had been stabbed. With the lights off, the killer of course came back to finish the job and she was stabbed again and screamed once more for help. Sadly, all that happened was the lights turning on, the killer fled the scene, and the lights were back off. Kitty was still trying to get home, to safety, when the killer came back once again and stabbed her a third and final time. Ending her life as the police were called a few minutes later.
   The video that we watched in class further adds to our discussion of the Bystander Effect because it showed that any individual will look around to see how others are responding to the situation and thus will act as others are acting. That is, until one person decides to take a different action. Such as in the video, when at last one person came to hug the man others soon followed. Even though many people will simply conform to being bystanders in a situation, there are also times when someone decides to get involved and help in the situation. For example, I've had a very bad habit of fainting on the train. To further add to the weirdness of it, it always happened right in between the same stop, 42nd Street Times Square. As busy as that station is, I was on the train heading to the station when it started getting really hot, I was dizzy and nauseous and colors were going crazy. Some people saw me but they did nothing, but finally someone asked me if I was ok. As my vision got more and more disoriented, I was left temporarily blind since I refused to faint no matter how much I wanted to. When the woman asked me if I was ok, people finally started getting involved. She and others helped me to a seat and looked after me until the symptoms passed and I regained my vision. Once my vision was regained, the train had finally arrived at 42nd Street. It was the longest one stop in my life and I'm glad that she decided to get involved and help me, it shows that there are people who care enough to not ignore someone's pain. Therefore, I feel that knowing about the Bystander Effect and the Kitty Genovese incident is useful to us because it exposes the truth about individual human behavior while in groups. Knowing this, we as humans should go against it. We should do something if we see a potentially dangerous situation or an emergency. If we were to involve ourselves more without looking for cues from other people, we could even save a life.