Although numerous people have blogged about the Stanford Prison experiment and Milgram's Electronic box experiment, I have not yet seen a blog about Kitty's stabbing and the experiment that followed. Kitty was stabbed in the night under a lamp post, and let out terrible screams while no one came to her rescue. As the documentary mentioned, many of the viewers watching this documentary think to themselves, "I would have been the one to go help" or "I would've been the hero." But in reality, a lot of us will act just as the bystanders did the night of Kitty's murder. The reason for this is that we all think that someone else will do the job for us, so that we don't have to bother getting out our flashlights, walking down the stairs, and checking to see if everything is ok under that light pole. So, because of the bystander effect, no one saved Kitty and she died that night.
I thought that this story was particularly interesting because it demonstrated how reliant we really are on other people. There were over 60 people who heard Kitty's screams that night, some who ignored them and some who admitted that they figured someone else would just go check to see what was happening. Later, this concept was being analyzed in an experiment to test whether a person would go help another if one was having a seizure. When there was only one person aware that the actor was having a seizure, he or she would immediately go to help. However, if there were multiple people in the room, the people would look around at each other before going to help. This experiment further proved the bystander effect-- when others are around, people are more likely to stand by while something is happening rather than step up and help.
Both of these examples demonstrate the bystander effect, but neither answers why this is the case. Is it because people are embarrassed to go help incase that they might be wrong about a situation? Is it because people are too lazy to help? But why would this be the case if they would jump right up if they were the only person around? In my opinion, I think that many people are scared to jump in because they may be blamed for something going wrong, when really they were just trying to help. This makes sense for Kitty's case because if someone had gone down to help Kitty and she still died, maybe the person helping would have been blamed for not doing a good enough job of protecting her. However, this reasoning does not work for all cases. Do you guys have any ideas for why the bystander effect occurs in such threatening situations?
I think that the bystander effect, rather simply, comes from fear of harm coming to one's self. I like how you bring out that most of us would like to think that we would be the hero, but the majority of us would not. I think the reason most of us would not be the hero would be because we either did not think there was actually a problem or we had no self-serving motivation to be the ones to call. In the case that we did call, our integrity would have to overpower our innate desire to only do things that actively benefit ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI believe the bystander effect is greatly influenced by what others would think. What I mean is that people want to be accepted so if they see others not going out and taking action, they will not as well. That person wants to belong to that group and in their head they might think "It's okay, everyone else isn't helping either".
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