The Diffusion of Responsibility: Examining The Bystander Effect

Why do people become passive witnesses in groups?

The bystander effect, also known as bystander apathy, is a theory that argues people are much less likely to help someone in need in the presence of others.

According to research, when there is a crowd, the larger the group, the more improbable one of them is going to lend a helping hand to the sufferer.

The theory first became widely known after the tragic case of Kitty Genovese, who was brutally attacked and murdered in 1964. What was thought-provoking about the case was that people who lived nearby heard her screams for help but no one intervened or called the police. The initial reports suggested that as many as 38 witnesses did nothing to help her.

There are a lot of reasons why people are not willing to take action when in a group, such as having a weak sense of responsibility as the liabilities of action or inaction no longer belong to one person.

Several factors can be attributed to the bystander effect:

• Diffusion of Responsibility: When a number of people are witnessing a situation, where someone needs help, each person in the group is likely to assume that someone else will intervene and therefore it is not their responsibility. This ensures everyone is much less likely to act.
• Herd Mentality: Most people are conformist by nature and they are likely to behave the same way others are behaving in a given situation. If we see people around us who are apathetic towards something that’s going on, we are likely to respond the same way and feel indifferent.
• Fear of Making a Mistake: People may be concerned that if they intervene or try to help in a crisis situation, they may make things worse by doing something wrong and/or humiliating themselves. This anxiety can discourage people from taking action.
• Pluralistic Ignorance: In large groups, people may mistakenly believe that everyone else holds a different opinion than their own and this can lead to inaction. For instance, if there is a person who needs help but no one seems to be acting due to the bystander effect, individuals might assume that if there was a real emergency someone would have stepped in and maybe their interpretation of the situation is wrong. If everyone is thinking along the same lines then the victim is much less likely to be helped.

Diffusion of responsibility is a phenomenon where there is a decreased responsibility to intervene when other witnesses are present.

This is because people in a group assume that either someone else will take action or has already done so. In emergency situations, people in large crowds are much less likely to display aiding behaviour as they expect others who are watching to do it and don’t see the need to intervene themselves. But if every person in the crowd has the same attitude, which is often the case, the person who needs help will get ignored. Similarly, in group settings where teamwork is required to work on an assignment, diffusion of responsibility is observed as members of the group feel less of a responsibility towards the completion of the task.

In a study, subjects were placed in one of three conditions:

• alone in a room
• with two other participants
• with two people who were pretending to be normal participants

Smoke would begin the fill the room while the participants were filling out questionnaires. If they were alone 75% of them reported the smoke, however when there were two other participants in the room, only 38% reported it. In the third group, the two people pretending to be regular participants visibly took notice of the smoke and proceeded to ignore it and the results were that only 10% of the participants as opposed to the 38% decided to report it.

Another experiment showed that 70% of people would help a woman in distress when they were the only witnesses, yet only 40% offered help when other people were in the vicinity. These show that, as much as diffusion of responsibility has an effect, the attitude of others around us and the fact that we are likely to conform also reduces the chances of someone intervening in a group. If everyone is ignoring a situation, taking action would cause us to stand out and this makes people more likely to hesitate and refrain.

Bystander Effect From a Psychoanalytic Perspective:

• Unconscious Motives: In psychoanalysis, it is theorized that our wishes, impulses and drives are not always conscious and our subconscious has a huge influence on our behaviours. In the case of bystander effect, unconscious factors may play a role. For instance, certain people in the group may be driven by their anxieties to refrain from helping and the rest become hesitant due to their lack of action.
• Defence Mechanisms: Psychoanalysis argues that people use a variety of defence mechanisms to cope with emotional struggles and these include denial, repression and rationalisation. People witnessing a crisis situation may be in denial due to the shock, repress what they see as it’s traumatic or come up with a reason why they cannot intervene to rationalise and justify their inaction.
• Inner Conflicts: We can have thoughts and feelings that contradict or disagree with one another. Psychoanalysis aims to explore how these have an effect on our behaviour. In the case of the bystander effect, the desire to do what’s morally right and self-preservation may create a conflict and cause the person to refrain from helping. In other words, if we are witnessing someone being attacked, even if we want to help, we might refrain as we don’t want to get in trouble ourselves.
• Childhood Experiences: In psychoanalysis, the fact that our relationship with our parents shapes our personality in adulthood is heavily emphasized. Past experiences may affect how we react to seeing someone who needs help — for instance, if we grew up in a household where we didn’t receive parental emotional support and this taught us that people should only rely on themselves as essentially we are all alone, we might be less likely to step in.

References:

[1]: Latane, B., Darley, J. M. (1969). Bystander “Apathy” American Scientist, 57(2), 224–268.

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