10a. Latane and Darley

Kitty Genovese murder

Kitty Genovese is stalked and murdered by Winston Moseley in Kew Gardens, New York City → police commissioner claims that 38 witneses had refused to intervene

5 step cognitive model

1. Notice that something is happening

2. Interpret the event as an emergency

3. Take responsibility for providing help

4. Decide how to act

5. Provide help

Bystander hypothesis

The more bystanders there are, the less emergency help due to 2 processes → pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility

The white smoke experiment

• N = 58 male Columbia University undergraduates

• Cover Story: Problems involved in life at an urban unversity

• Asked to sit in a ‘waiting room’ and fill in a survey

• Room begins to fill with an invisible (harmless) white smoke

• Independent Variable → Group size: Participant alone / Participant with two others

  • Others: Confederates who do not react / Naïve participants

• Dependent Variable → Behavioural response to emergency

What 2 factors were considered in terms of the behavioural response to emergency

1. Did the participant leave the room to report the smoke? (yes/no)

2. How many minutes did it take until the person reports?

Findings of white smoke experiement

• Findings (Crucial Data Points):

  • Alone: 75% reported the smoke (55% within 2 minutes).

  • Two Naive Participants: 38% reported the smoke (only 12% within 2 minutes).

  • Two Passive Confederates: Only 10% reported the smoke (10% within 2 minutes).

The seizure experiment

• N = 72 New York University undergraduate Psychology students

• Cover Story: Discussion about personal problems of students while at uni

• Seated in one of several small rooms – to supposedly retain anonymity

• Can hear ‘other discussants’ (actually recordings) through headphones and communicate via intercom in turns

• Emergency event: One ‘discussant’ admits to being prone to seizures, and expresses distress when it is his turn again […I’m gonna die-er-er … help-er-er-seizure (chokes, then quiet)]

• Independent variable → group size: 1, 2, or 6 ‘others’

• Dependent variable → behavioural response to emergency

Findings of the seizure experiment

The speed and likelihood of responding dropped significantly as perceived group size increased

Debate around Kitty Genovese murder

Court proceedings suggest far fewer, and only 3 people who saw Moseley and Genovese together

Culturally-embedded theorising

Criticism → researchers have failed to translate this gender aspect of the Kitty Genovese case into their experiments

CCTV stucies

Criticism → Latane and Darley studies do not examine violent situations as in the Kitty Genovese case

Follow-up study using CCTV footage (Levine et al., 2011)

• 42 CCTV clips from a city in Northwest of England

• Key findings → number of bystanders correlates with more concilatory behaviour and sequence of event is important

Social identiy of bystander

Criticism → the study does not examine the relationship between the victim, the bystanders ad perpertrators

Social inhibition

Likelihood that a bystander helps

Latane & Nida meta analysis

• Review of 50 studies

• Probability of helping in a group = 22%

• Probability of helping alone = 50%

• Conclusion = the bystander effect has “withstood the tests of time and replication”

Fischer et al meta analysis

• First quantitative (statistical meta analysis) of the bystander effect

• 105 studies and 7,700 participants

• Overall effect size → g = -0.35 (small to moderate effect)

• Effect stronger when non-dangerous, perpertrator not present, non physical costs

Bystander and ally training

Many interventions include a component on how to encourage bystanders to get involved, however, the group is often conceptualised as an inhibitor rather than a resource

Beyond emergency help

• Charitable giving → Lee et al., 2017

• Collective action → Saab et al., 2015

• Witnesses to a crime → Huston et al., 1981

• “Whistleblowrs” → Gao et al., 2015

• International aid → Lim & Barnett, 2009