Bystander Intervention

Abstract

In March 1964, a man chased a woman in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York City. After he caught her, he stabbed her, raped her, left, returned, stabbed her again, and, finally, left her to die in front of her apartment. This murder case was one out of 9,360 killings in the United States in 1964, which did not attract much media attention in the beginning. However, after a meeting between a police commissioner and the New York Times editor, this murder attracted massive media attention. In that meeting, the police commissioner claimed that he had the names of allegedly thirty-eight neighbors who watched the attack from the safety of their apartments without assisting the victim, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese (see Historical Background – The Kitty Genovese Case), for over half an hour. The media coverage was echoed by a huge public debate. In this debate, many experts testified the breakdown of moral and social values. Particularly, they claimed that, in general, witnesses of an emergency (bystanders) are apathetic, indifferent, and unconcerned. However, the social scientists Bibb Latané and John M. Darley were not convinced by claims that Kitty’s murder reflected processes of a social breakdown. Instead, they argued that maybe more generic psychological factors might be at work during the intervention process that hinders intervention. Latané and Darley argued furthermore that when each member of a group of bystanders is aware that other people are also present, each would be less likely to notice the emergency, less likely to decide that it is an emergency, and less likely to act. Consequently, they concluded that the presence of other people inhibits the impulse to help. To test this conclusion, Latané and Darley designed some of the most influential experiments in the history of social psychology. In those experiments, participants were faced with a variety of staged emergencies, either alone or in the presence of other people. These classic experiments provided encompassing evidence for the bystander effect, that is, that the presence of others decreases the likelihood of intervention in emergencies. Although the bystander effect has been one of the most robust and reliable findings in social psychology, more recent research also shows that the presence of others reduces or even reverses the bystander effect. In sum, research on bystander behavior has provided evidence that the presence of others can both inhibit and foster emergency intervention.