The bystander effect

Today would like to share something related with psychology - The bystander effect

Bystander effects happened when there are many bystander observe the emergency , and none of them lend a hand to the one who are in need. Hmmm, it looks like the people in the video are cruel, inhuman and emotionless. But when it happened on our daily life, I think the majority of us will still be one of the bystander just like what has been tested by the researcher in the video.

Why is it that people are less likely to help when others are present? All the bystanders are going through a five steps of decision making...

1) Noticing an events

Of cause, no people can consider to give a hand if they not even notice the events. Sometimes, people are in rush and could not attend to all the incident happens around us. Some emergency is not so obvious until able to get the attention from the surroundings immediately. Thus, noticing an events is the first stage for the bystanders to decide whether they want to help.

2) Interpret the event as an emergency

After noticing the event, the bystander will interpret the event as an usual event or it is an emergency. Most of the time people will refer to the response of the people around them in interpreting the situation is an emergency or not. This is because in an crisis situation, people will tend to seek information from the people around. The information can be as simple as how they react to the situation - a phenomenon called the Informational Social Influence. When they don't see anyone giving help to the people in need, there comes the pluralistic ignorance whereby people think that everyone else is interpreting the situation in the same and correct way as they does, when in fact they are not.

3) Assume responsibility

When the number of bystander increase, the responsibility held by each of the bystander decrease. They assume that someone among them will take the responsibility and give help to the person. When everyone also thinking in the same way, there goes diffusion of responsibility. and at the end, everyone still remain as a bystanders.

4) Know appropriate form of assistance

Of cause, when a person decided to help in the emergency. He need to know how capable he is in providing assistance. Impossible we expect everyone to help a drowning person when he himself do not know how to swim. It might lead to another form of disaster. Thus, having the knowledge and know the methods to help is one of the important factors in making the decision to be a bystander or a helper. Of cause, the very basic help we can made is making a phone call to the emergency line.

5) Implement decision

Lastly, sometimes we have the knowledge to help but still we will reconsider whether we want to give the help. For example, everyone have a phone but when incident happen, not everyone willing to take out the phone and call the authority. This is obvious especially in Malaysian Chinese because many of us think that, calling the police might spend a lot of our time in police station. So, we usually will expect someone who have more free time compare to us to take this responsibility. At the end, we decided not to provide the help even just making a call because we think that the cost of trying to help is larger than the rewards we get from there.

This 5 stages help to explain the behavior of most of the human beings when they meet an emergency situation. It is really sad to see majority of the people are so ignorant to their counterpart from the same species.

Anyhow, you can help to make a difference by breaker this bystander effects just as simple as making a phone call to the emergency line when you see some emergency situation. =)

Reference : Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (2010). Social Psychology. New Jersey: Pearson Education.