This is part 1 of 4 on this topic, so stay tuned for follow up posts on this topic. In this post I want to introduce concepts relating to why people don't help others in need. The 2nd part will expand on this post with similar ideas and concepts. The 3rd part will explain that it is not just a New York City problem, as this post might make people think. The last part will go into factors that increase or decrease the likelihood someone will help another person.
In a previous post I mentioned a homeless man in New York City that was stabbed. This news story made international headlines because the homeless man was trying to help a woman out when he was stabbed, and as he was dying, people ignored him. People were disgusted by it and wanted to find someone or something to blame. Some blamed New York City, some blamed the political parties. It is easy to see why people were outraged and disgusted.
When I first heard about this, I was disappointed and saddened by it, but I was not surprised about it. I did not go demanding answers or try to find someone to blame for it. The reason why is because we already know the answers for this behavior. This is part of why I want to share research and ideas from Psychology. This is behavior that I believe people were made aware of it, then it might not happen quite so much. It is behavior that with understanding, it can be stopped.
Quite often it is negative events that researchers get ideas from. In this case, we need to go back to a horrible murder (also in New York City) that happened on March 13th, 1964. It was the horrendous murder of Kitty Genovese that got a lot of attention. She was stabbed twice near her home, the perpetrator was scared off by the noise she made. He came back and stabbed her some more, and stole some money from her. This caused a huge uproar because her neighbors heard it happening, but almost none of them did anything. In fact, the story of Kitty Genovese played an important role in the movie Boondock Saints. Please note that in the clip, they changed the actual events a little, such as it says it happened in broad daylight, when it actually happened in the middle of the night. It is still a great clip and can possibly thought of as inspiring.
This inspired two social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané to research this behavior. In their first experiment, they had a participant communicating with a confederate (someone whose actions were scripted by the researchers, but participants aren't aware of that) through an intercom. The confederate would have a fake seizure and call for help. Darley and Latané measured the response times of the participants. What they found is that the more participants in the room, the less likely they were to help the confederate. They termed this the Bystander Effect, which is the idea that the more people who are present, the less likely we are to help someone in an emergency. This is also connected to the diffusion of responsibility, which says that the more people that are around, the more we expect that someone else will help. We feel less responsible for helping someone. Obviously, if there is no one else around, there is no diffusion of responsibility, because we cannot pass it on the anyone else.
Stay tuned for part 2 on this topic, where we continue to explore this form of human behavior.
