THE BYSTANDER EFFECT David Park, Vinny Wetzel

PSYCHOLOGISTS John Darley  April 3, 1938 (alive)  Studied at Swarthmore College  Made contributions to the study of helping behavior Bibb Latané  July 19, 1937 (alive)  Awarded twice for the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research  Studied at Yale  Contributed to the social influence of populations

THE PURPOSE o They wanted to see if people would help each other in situations of life or death o Girl named Kitty Genovese was murdered outside of her house o There were bystanders o they did nothing o This was the first case that interested Darley and Latané

THE EXPERIMENT  They wanted to see if people would help each other in situations of life or death  Faked dying situations to see a persons reaction time and what they would do to help the person in danger  Used people who were unaware of the event taking place  Used Columbia University students for experiments  In 2000, they used people in chats rooms to see if it had the same effect as people in a “non cyber” environment

RESULTS  It took longer for people in groups to help each other  People alone would notice and react to the danger faster than the people in groups  The same result applies to people in chat rooms

PROBLEMS Bystanders could actually get hurt The participants could have been injured

WOULD YOU PARTICIPATE????//? David “I would’ve definitely participated in it” – David Park, 2015 Why: “I would like to see how I would react in a situation like they do in their experiments.” Vinny “Sure man, why not?” – Vinny Wetzel, 2015 Why: “I think it would be cool if I could participate in this. I would like to see what I would actually do.”