THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

David Park, Vinny Wetzel

PSYCHOLOGISTS

John Darley

April 3, 1938 (alive)

Studied at Swarthmore College

Made contributions to the study of helping behavior

Bibb Latané

July 19, 1937 (alive) Awarded twice for the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research

Studied at Yale

Contributed to the social influence of populations

THE PURPOSE

oThey wanted to see if people would help each other in situations of

life or death

oGirl named Kitty Genovese was murdered outside of her house

oThere were bystanders

othey did nothing

oThis was the first case that interested Darley and Latané

THE EXPERIMENT

They wanted to see if people would help each other in situations of life or death

Faked dying situations to see a persons reaction time and what they would do to help the person in danger

Used people who were unaware of the event taking placeUsed Columbia University students for experiments

In 2000, they used people in chats rooms to see if it had the same effect as people in a “non cyber” environment

RESULTS

It took longer for people in groups to help each other

People alone would notice and react to the danger faster than the people in groups

The same result applies to people in chat rooms

PROBLEMS

Bystanders could actually get hurt

The participants could have been injured

WOULD YOU PARTICIPATE????//?

David

“I would’ve definitely participated in it” – David Park, 2015

Why:

“I would like to see how I would react in a situation like they do in their experiments.”

Vinny

“Sure man, why not?” – Vinny Wetzel, 2015

Why:

“I think it would be cool if I could participate in this. I would like to see what I would actually do.”