Bystander Intervention:

When will a person who is not involved in an emergency help?

Two possible explanations why people in urban areas don't help:

1. People in cities are apathetic - they don't care about other people.

2. The social situation in a city makes people less likely to help.

Latane and Darley: Studied how the social situation in cities keeps people from helping.

Bystander Intervention Model: A person has to go through 3 steps before they can help in an emergency.

1. Must notice the emergency.
2. Must interpret the event as an emergency.
3. Must decide it's their responsibility to help.

When other people are around we don't notice emergencies.

1. "Overload" makes us not notice emergencies.

• In cities we try to "block out" noises and people and not notice them

1. It's impolite to pay attention to strangers.

• We learn to keep our eyes to ourselves when we're among strangers.

• Subjects fill out forms in a room.
• Smoke begins to pour in through vent.
• After a minute it's difficult to see forms, hard to breathe.

Subject Alone:

• 75% reported fire within 4 minutes

• 38% reported fire with 4 minutes

Step 2. Will we decide the event is an emergency?

1. People convince themselves an event is not an emergency.

College students in a room filling out customer survey about toys.

They are told that in next room two kids are playing with the toys.

After 2 minutes subjects hear kids begin to fight (actually a tape recording)

Big Kid: "Give me the toy"

Little Kid: "No!" -- SMACK!

Little Kid, crying: "here, you can have the toy, please no!"

Big Kid: "It's Too Late! Now I'm going to beat you up!"

Little Kid - no! no! - crash - I'm bleeding!
 

	What Subjects In Experiment Were Told
	Kids are Alone (Some Responsibility to Help)	Don't Disturb Kids:Adult Near (no responsibility to help)
How Many of the subjects tried to stop the fight?	5%	5%
How many said that it was probably fake?	88%	25%

• Subjects who felt responsible convinced themselves it was fake.
• Subjects who didn't feel responsible didn't convince themselves it was fake.

More of Step 2, Deciding it's An Emergency:

b. When other people are around in an emergency we experience:

Pluralistic Ignorance: People judge if a situation is an emergency by looking at everyone else's reactions.

• In a situation that might be an emergency, everyone looks at everyone else's reaction.
• Everybody tries to look calm
• Since everyone looks calm, we decide there's no emergency.

Experimenters measured Amount of Time Until People Reacted when room filled up with smoke

Subject Alone:

• 75% reported fire within 4 minutes

• Only 10% of subjects reported fire within 4 minutes.
• Subjects were rubbing eyes and waving smoke away but didn't report fire.

The more people who see an emergency happen, the less each person feels responsible to help.

Seizure Study

Students Discussing School Life.

Each student in a cubicle wearing headphones and talking into microphone.

Students hear each other and can talk to each other but can't see each other.

All the students except the subject were really actors.

After 1 minute one of the students (an actor) mentioned that they sometimes get seizures.

After 5 minutes the seizure student started having a seizure

"I, er, um, I think I need -- uhhhh -- help -- could -- uhhh somebody -- I'm having a real problem -- er - right now -- could somebody -- uhh gaahhhhhh....
 

Why didn't the person help when other people were around?

Diffusion of responsibility:
The more people see an emergency, the less responsibility each person individually feels. If there is only one witness, they feel all the blame for not helping. If there are lots of witnesses, each person feels less blame.

Summary:

Urban areas make people less likely to help because:

Being with a group of people when there's an emergency:

1. keeps you from noticing the emergency

2. tends to make you decide it's not an emergency

3. makes you feel like it's not really your responsibility.