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Bystander Effect Essay

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The bystander Effect (literally the passer-by effect) can be define as the dispersion of responsibility that can occur during an emergency when people are in a group.
The first Study about this effect took place after the murder, in March 1964, of Catherine Genovese (aka Kitty). On her way home one evening after work, she was stabbed to death and then raped in front of her house. This murder caused quite a stir, and it turned out there were at least 38 witnesses present or at least nearby. Of these 38 witness, nobody did anything to help the young woman.
A few years later some social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane waged a research called “Bystander Intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility” about why none of the witnesses …show more content…
In this research (“Bystander Intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility”), the participants were the students. In the experiment made by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968, the student individually enters laboratory, which was long corridor with separate rooms, sit in one of these little rooms and one at time each student start talking about his personal problems for two minutes and then is passed to another student, this until one of the student (in the reality the researcher) pretend to have a seizure. The results is only the 38% of student try to help while the other 68% does not do anything.
That (this?) because the greater the number of witnesses attending to an emergency, the less likely that any of them will help the victim because empower (feeling of responsibility) is more easily when they are alone than when they are in-group. If they are in a group, the individual tends to delegate to others the task of intervening. The mere fact of having the company of others can inhibit the process of observation the surrounding

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