Introduction
In early 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in front of her New York City apartment building as she returned from work around 3:30 a.m. The assault was particularly brutal, actually consisting of three separate attacks stretching over a period of more than half an hour. Perhaps most shocking about this tragedy, however, was a troubling fact that emerged in the police department’s subsequent investigation: Thirty-eight of the woman’s neighbors had witnessed the incident without intervening. No one had even called the police during the episode.
This case was only one of several similar occurrences that took place in the mid-1960s, attracting considerable attention and prompting much commentary. The remarks of newspaper columnists, magazine writers, and the like focused on such notions as “alienation,” “apathy,” “indifference,” and “lack of concern for our fellow humans.” Bibb Latané and John Darley, social psychologists who at the time were professors at universities in New York City, reasoned that ascribing such personality characteristics to bystanders who fail to help is not the key to understanding how onlookers can remain inactive while another individual is victimized. Rather, one must look to the situation itself to uncover the powerful social forces that inhibit helping.
Latané and Darley thus embarked on a program of research that culminated in their classic 1970 book The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? They began their analysis of the “ bystander effect” by recognizing several good reasons that one should not necessarily expect bystanders to offer help in an emergency. For example, most people are not prepared to deal with emergencies, which tend to happen quickly and without warning. In addition, direct intervention may involve real physical danger, as in the Genovese incident. Finally, becoming involved in such situations may lead to court appearances or other legal consequences.
Latané and Darley also proposed a model describing a sequence of cognitive events that must occur before a bystander will offer assistance in an emergency. First, a bystander must notice the event. Second, he or she must interpret that event as an emergency. Third, the bystander must decide that it is his or her responsibility to do something. At this point, two steps in the process still remain: The bystander must decide exactly what to do, and then he or she must successfully implement that decision. It is important to recognize that a negative outcome at any of these steps in the decision-making process will prevent helping. In the light of this cognitive process and the other reasons that people fail to intervene in emergencies, it is perhaps surprising, Latané and Darley suggested, that bystanders ever help.
Factors That Prevent Assistance
Remarkably (and ironically), one situational factor is primarily responsible for the social inhibition of helping: the presence of other people. Latané and Darley proposed three social psychological processes to explain precisely how the presence of others inhibits helping. Each operates within the decision-making framework described earlier, and all three appear to be necessary to account completely for the bystander effect.
The first of these processes is audience inhibition, which refers to people’s general reluctance to do things in front of others. When people are aware that their behavior is on public display and are concerned about what other people think, they may be hesitant to offer help for fear of appearing incompetent. Furthermore, a bystander who decides to offer help will be embarrassed if it turns out that he or she has misinterpreted the situation when it is not really an emergency. For example, how might a person feel if he or she stepped out of the crowd to administer CPR to a man lying unconscious on the ground, only to roll him over and realize that he is merely intoxicated? Risks of this sort are greater when larger numbers of other people are present.
The second process, social influence, frequently contributes to the social inhibition of helping by leading bystanders to misinterpret the event. Emergencies are often ambiguous, and a person confronted with ambiguity will look to the behavior of other people for clues about how to behave. While the person is attempting to appraise the reactions of other people, he or she will probably attempt to remain calm. That person, then, is likely to see a group of others doing exactly the same: appearing calm and doing nothing while trying to figure out whether a true emergency is taking place. Each person will be fooled by the inaction of everyone else into thinking that the situation is less serious than it really is and that not intervening is the appropriate course of action. The ultimate result is a sort of group behavioral paralysis, and the victim goes without help.
The final process, the most powerful of the three, was probably the main force at work in the Genovese incident (social influence was probably not involved, since witnesses remained isolated from one another in their own apartments). This phenomenon, known as diffusion of responsibility, occurs when an individual knows that others are available to help. While a lone bystander at an emergency bears the total responsibility for helping, those in a group share the responsibility equally with the others present. Thus, the larger the number of other witnesses, the smaller is each individual’s obligation to act. As a result, individuals in groups are likely to assume that someone else will intervene.
Social Psychological Research
Latané and Darley tested their ideas in a number of ingenious experiments, several of which are considered classic examples of social psychological research. In one of these, Columbia University students arrived individually at a laboratory to take part in a study that they believed would involve an interview. Each subject was sent to a waiting room to complete a preliminary questionnaire. Some of them found two other people already seated in the room, while others sat down alone.
Soon after the subject began working on the questionnaire, smoke began filling the room through a wall vent. The smoke could hardly be ignored; within four minutes the room contained enough smoke to interfere with vision and breathing. Latané and Darley were primarily interested in how frequently subjects simply got up and left the room to report the emergency. Most (75 percent) of the subjects who were waiting alone reported the smoke, but those in groups were far less likely to do so. Groups consisting of three naïve (never tested) subjects reported it only 38 percent of the time; when the subject waited (unknowingly) with two confederates who were instructed to do nothing, only 10 percent responded. In a social psychological experiment, a confederate is a person instructed to behave in a certain way.
Observations of the unresponsive subjects supported the researchers’ notion that the social influence process in groups would inhibit helping by leading people to misinterpret the situation. Interviews with these participants revealed that they had produced a variety of explanations for the smoke: air conditioning vapor, steam, smog, and even “truth gas.” In other words, lone subjects for the most part behaved responsibly, but those in groups were generally led by the inaction of others to conclude almost anything but the obvious—that a legitimate emergency was taking place. It is important to realize that social influence, as demonstrated in this experiment, is most potent when bystanders in groups do not communicate with one another; such was the case in this experiment, and such tends to be the case with analogous groups in real life. Simply talking to the others present can clarify what really is happening, thus eliminating the bystander effect.
Diffusion-of-Responsibility Research
A second classic study demonstrates the power of the diffusion-of-responsibility process. In this experiment, college students thought they were participating in a group discussion about the difficulties of adjusting to college. To reduce the discomfort that could be associated with discussing personal matters, each subject was ushered to a private cubicle from which he or she would communicate with other group members through an intercom system. In each case, however, there was only one actual subject; the other “group members” had been previously tape recorded. Thus, Latané and Darley were able to manipulate the size of the group as perceived by the subject.
Each “member” of the group talked for two minutes, with the actual subject speaking last. A second round then began, and the first “group member” to speak began suffering a frighteningly severe epileptic seizure, choking and pleading for help. Since the subject had no idea where the other “group members” were located, the only available course of helping action was to leave the cubicle and report the emergency to the person in charge.
On the basis of the diffusion-of-responsibility concept, Latané and Darley expected that the likelihood of helping would decrease as the perceived size of the group increased. When the subject was part of a two-person group (only the subject and the victim, thus making the subject the only person available to help), 85 percent of the participants reported the seizure. When the subject believed that he or she was in a group of three, 62 percent responded. Only 31 percent of those who thought they were in a six-person group offered help. Without question, the responsibility for acting in this emergency was perceived to be divided among everyone believed to be available to help.
The circumstances of this experiment correspond directly to those of the Genovese murder. Most important, the subjects in this study were not in a face-to-face group, just as the witnesses to the Genovese murder were isolated in their own apartments; consequently, social influence could not lead to a misinterpretation of the event (which was not ambiguous anyway). In short, simply knowing that others are available to respond acts as a powerful deterrent to helping. It is also significant that this experiment demonstrated that bystanders who fail to intervene are usually not the least bit apathetic or indifferent. Rather, the typical unresponsive subject showed clear signs of distress over the plight of the victim; nevertheless, the belief that others were present still tended to suppress intervention.
Diffusion of responsibility is a common social force and is not restricted to serious situations. Anyone who has failed to work as hard as possible on a group task, heard a doorbell go unanswered at a party, or experienced a telephone ringing seven or eight times even though the entire family is at home has probably fallen victim to the same process.
Power of Situational Forces
The work of Latané and Darley attracted much attention and acclaim. From a methodological standpoint, their experiments are still regarded as some of social psychology’s most clever and intriguing. Their findings, however, were even more remarkable: Demonstrating consistently the social inhibition of helping, they destroyed the common belief in “safety in numbers.” This research also provides a powerful illustration of one of the major lessons of social psychology—that situational forces affecting behavior can be overpowering, eliminating at least temporarily the influence of personality. The work of Latané and Darley showed convincingly that a person cannot rely on human nature, kindness, or any other dispositional quality if he or she should become the victim of an emergency.
This program of research also provided the impetus for much work on helping that has been conducted by other investigators. Various kinds of precipitating incidents were examined, as were differences between experiments conducted in laboratories and those performed in natural settings. Other studies investigated the effects of a wide range of different characteristics of the subjects, victims, and other bystanders involved. It was discovered, for example, that people are more likely to offer assistance when someone else has already modeled helping behavior and if the victim is particularly needy, deserving, or somehow similar to the helper; certain transitory mood states, such as happiness and guilt, were also found to increase helping.
Despite the large assortment of factors investigated, many of these other studies included a manipulation of the variable that had been the principal concern of Latané and Darley: group size. Two major articles published by Latané and his colleagues in 1981 reviewed nearly one hundred different instances of research comparing helping by individuals in groups with that by lone bystanders. They found in these studies, almost without exception, that people were less likely to help in groups than when they were alone, suggesting that the bystander effect is perhaps as consistent and predictable as any within the domain of social psychology.
Although incidents such as the murder of Genovese do not occur every day, it is important to recognize that scores of them have been reported over the years, and they continue to occur regularly. Unfortunately, the understanding provided by the research has not led to strategies for avoiding these tragedies. (Considering the ability of situational forces to override personality influences, one should not be too surprised by this.) There is, however, one bit of hope: At least one study has demonstrated that students who have learned about the bystander effect in a psychology class are more likely to intervene in an emergency than those who have not been exposed to that material.
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