Bystander Intervention in Emergencies Psychology Reaction Paper

Name:
Tutor:
Course:
Date:
Bystander Intervention in Emergencies
Introduction
The cultural norm of expecting an individual to help another in need is complicated by; uncertainty, little experience, stress and the urgency of the situation. These studies aimed to investigate if an individual is more or less likely to undertake the social responsible action in case of an emergency if they thought that there were other bystanders present.
According to “diffusion of responsibility”, an individual is more likely to respond to an emergency when alone as he is solely responsible for it. If others are present, then his burden/responsibility to act is shared by all present and thus he is less inclined to intervene CITATION Bib68 \l 1033 (Bibb Latane, John.M.Darley, 1968).
To illustrate this, subjects could hear an individual undergoing an epileptic-like episode in another room. They were isolated and couldn’t discuss their next course of action. One individual thought that only he could hear the emergency while yet another thought that four others heard it too. Subjects that were alone needed just 1/3 of the time, as subjects who thought others were present, to react.
In the second study, male undergraduates found themselves in a room gradually filling with smoke as they waited for an interview. They were either alone; with two passive confederates or in groups of three. This study aimed to find out the length of time it took subjects to leave the room and report on the smoke. The smoke was fine titanium dioxide. If a subject left the room to report, he was told that the matter would be looked into and if reporting hadn’t occurred after six minutes, the experiment was terminated.
When the subjects were alone, they reported the smoke calmly and on an average reporting time of two minutes. Three quarters of them reported before the experiment was terminated. The second group involved one subject and two passive confederates. For the ten subjects tested, only...