4 ms·

The whole point of the "bystander effect" is that this diffusion of responsibility leads to nobody intervening. Nobody cares if the chances of a specific bystan

The whole point of the "bystander effect" is that this diffusion of responsibility leads to nobody intervening. Nobody cares if the chances of a specific bystander intervening goes down when there's a crowd, all that matters is whether someone intervenes, and the bystander effect claimed that a crowd meant the chances of intervention would go down overall.

your-nanny 7y ago
I imagine psychologists care a great deal about that difference.
pessimizer 7y ago
I'm understanding that's not the finding, although that's the popularly understood point. You would expect each person to be individually less likely to help when there are other people around. Somebody else might have already intervened, and you might just be getting in the way. Not everybody can help, at least not at once. I mean, in some situations, people actually fear to intervene, and have a legitimate fear for their own safety, but if they can call the police once they're secure (or if they are clearly secure e.g. viewing from a distance), people do it. A lot of people called about Kitty Genovese as it was happening, watching it from their apartments. That became a newspaper article - which was basically typical right-wing linkbait: it wasn't slow police response, it was the heartless crowd that killed Kitty. That Slate dot com tier take became a theory, developed experiments, and discovered something that was obviously mathematically true: if not everybody in a group helps someone that they see in distress (only a subset do), but individuals always help when alone, then in groups, the average time before response for each individual is going to go up, and the average likelihood of any response at all from a particular individual is going to go down. This would be true even if people were always helped faster by groups rather than individuals, and a subset of every group always intervened. The types of people that bystander experiments found to be likely interveners could just adhere to the stereotypes that people think of as physically authoritative and look to when something occurs. People look to them to intervene (large, male, athletic, maybe ethnic or rough looking in criminal/street situations) maybe those people intervene because there no one for them to pass the responsibility off to.

your-nanny 7y ago

I imagine psychologists care a great deal about that difference.

pessimizer 7y ago

I'm understanding that's not the finding, although that's the popularly understood point. You would expect each person to be individually less likely to help when there are other people around. Somebody else might have already intervened, and you might just be getting in the way. Not everybody can help, at least not at once. I mean, in some situations, people actually fear to intervene, and have a legitimate fear for their own safety, but if they can call the police once they're secure (or if they are clearly secure e.g. viewing from a distance), people do it. A lot of people called about Kitty Genovese as it was happening, watching it from their apartments. That became a newspaper article - which was basically typical right-wing linkbait: it wasn't slow police response, it was the heartless crowd that killed Kitty. That Slate dot com tier take became a theory, developed experiments, and discovered something that was obviously mathematically true: if not everybody in a group helps someone that they see in distress (only a subset do), but individuals always help when alone, then in groups, the average time before response for each individual is going to go up, and the average likelihood of any response at all from a particular individual is going to go down. This would be true even if people were always helped faster by groups rather than individuals, and a subset of every group always intervened. The types of people that bystander experiments found to be likely interveners could just adhere to the stereotypes that people think of as physically authoritative and look to when something occurs. People look to them to intervene (large, male, athletic, maybe ethnic or rough looking in criminal/street situations) maybe those people intervene because there no one for them to pass the responsibility off to.