The Bystander Effect Refers to a Social Psychological Theory

The Bystander Effect Refers to a Social Psychological Theory
The bystander effect refers to a social psychological theory stating that the likelihood of an individual helping in an emergency decreases when other passive bystanders are present. This phenomenon has been attributed to several things, one of which is the tendency among people to assume that because others are not acting, it is not an emergency. Another reason for bystander apathy is the general assumption among bystanders that other people will take responsibility for helping. Other less apathetic reasons for the bystander effect do not have the necessary skills to intervene and worrying about danger, embarrassment, or legislation. Several scholars have identified several psychological developments likely to result in bystander apathy, including diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, and victim effects, all of which have been shown to influence helping behavior. Diffusion of responsibility denotes the proneness among bystanders to subjectively divide the personal duty to intervene by the number of bystanders present.
As the number of bystanders at the emergency scene increases, people feel a less personal responsibility to help and are therefore less likely to intervene. This psychological process is consistent with real-life situations where a task is usually shared between the number of people present instead of delegating the entire duty to one person. In an emergency, people use the same principle to diffuse the responsibility of intervening among the group present: the moral obligation to intervene in an emergency is never directed at one person but the entire group witnessing the situation. Two other ideas are associated with this psychological process: the tendency among bystanders to believe that someone in the group will offer to help and that the blame for not assisting will not fall on one person. Instead, the blame will be shared equally. An experiment by Darley and Latane (1968) showed that, consistent with the idea of diffusion of responsibility, the smaller the bystander group, the higher the chances of the victim receiving timely help (Hortensius & de Gelder, 2018). However, the study also determined that bystander apathy is not just due to indifference but also includes some element of indecision on the part of the bystanders.
Bystander indecision is captured in the psychological process referred to as pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance denotes bystanders' tendency to rely on others' open responses when judging an ambiguous situation. Pluralistic ignorance is tied to the concept of evaluation apprehension, w...