1. What is the social area? Conformity Environment Obedience
Situational factors
Social context
Peers/peer pressure
Looks at range of behaviours, primarily social in nature
Occurs between groups of people
Social psych is interested in the effects of the enviroment or situations have on peoples behaviour

2. Strengths
+ Provides useful contributions to the understanding of social behaviour + Attempts to conduct research within real life settings, and therefore is high in ecological validity + Has provided many practical applications for society (e.g. the running of prisons)

3. Weaknesses
– Underestimates the role of individual differences and personality in explaining human behaviour – Tends to breach ethical guidelines and therefore may cause some level of harm to participants within research – Explanations can be deterministic, as they assume that all behaviour is the result of social processes

4. How helpful are you?
When you help someone, do you expect anything in return?
Doing a good deed without getting any reward is known as altruism.
Some people argue that there is no such thing as altruism, as even if you don’t get anything physical, feeling good about doing a good deed is a reward in itself.

5. Would you help someone who was in trouble?
What would you take into account before jumping to help someone?

6. Kitty Genovese
Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old woman who was murdered in New York in 1964 after being attacked on three different occasions by the same man while she was walking home.
Imagine you witnessed this, what would you do?
Help?
Call the police?

7. NONE of these occurred
She was attacked in a residential area and several witnesses (an alleged 37 people) witnessed the attacks, but no one went to help her – or even called the police.
Why did this happen?
The bystander effect is when a group of people does not offer help or assistance in any way when witnessing someone in need.

8. The bystander effect Diffusion of responsibility:
This is a theory that predicts that the more people there are in a situation, the less likely it is that a person in need will receive help. Everyone believes that someone else should help, so no one does anything.

9. Pillavin et al. (1969)
Wanted to extend the early studies of bystander behaviour in several ways Firstly, to study bystander outside of laboratory, in real life, where participants have clear view of the victim Secondly, if helping behaviour is affected by four important variables

10. Piliavin wanted to investigate: (hypothesis)
Would an ill person get more help than a drunk person? (the type of victim)
Would people help others of the same race before helping those of different races? (race of victim)
If a model person started helping the victim, would that encourage others to also help? (someone setting an example)
Would the number of bystanders who saw the victim influence how much help was given? (number of bystanders)
Based on these, what do you think the hypotheses will be?

11. Hypothesis Piliavin et al. hypothesised that:
A drunk person would get less help than an ill victim.
People would help others of the same race first.
Seeing a model person helping would encourage others to help.
The larger the group, the less likely it is the victim will receive help.
What do you think will happen?

12. Method - sample
Participants were passengers who were on board the 8th Avenue subway express train in New York.
They did not know they were taking part in a study, gave no consent and were not debriefed – what's wrong with this?
Approximately 4,450 participants took part in the study over three months – issue here?
55 per cent of them were white and 45 per cent were black – issue here?
The study took place daily on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. over three months. – issue here?
The experiment always took place between the same two stops on the train as there was a 7.5 minute period with no interruptions. - issue here?

13. Procedure
Using teams of university students, a situation was created on the train to see how passengers would react to it.
Seventy seconds into the journey, one of the university students would stagger forwards and collapse on the train.
The student would always collapse in the same spot – designated the ‘critical area’. The other side of the train was called the ‘adjacent area’.
Participants’ reactions were then watched by covert observers.

14. The researchers
Four teams of university students ran the study for three months.
Each team had two females and two males.
The males always played the part of the victim and model.
The females covertly observed the participants’ reactions from behind newspapers.
Observers recorded:
The race, gender and location of passengers on the train.
The race, gender and location of passengers who helped the victim.
How long it took passengers to help the victim.
What passengers said to each other when they noticed the victim.
At the end of the three months, the teams had conducted 103 trials on the train.

15. Conditions The victim The model
In some trials the victim would appear ill and would hold a walking cane.
In some trials a model (a researcher in disguise) would help the victim up.
In other trials the victim would appear drunk, smell like alcohol and have a bottle in a brown paper bag.
The model would either help quickly (after 70 secs) or slowly (after 150 secs).
The race of the victim would vary. Sometimes he was white and sometimes he was black.
He would either be in the critical area or the adjacent area.
Model conditions:
The victim always wore the same clothes and was always aged between 26 and 35.
Critical area / Quickly
Critical area / Slowly
Adjacent area / Quickly
Adjacent area / Slowly
No model

16. What do these results say about the aim?
Piliavin et al. hypothesised that…
A drunk person would get less help than an ill victim.
Ill victims received help 95% of the time (62/65 trials).
Drunk victims received help 50% of the time (19/38 trials).
People would help others of the same race first.
Race did not really have a large effect on who helped whom.
Black victims received slightly less help, although this is not significant.
Seeing a model person would encourage others to help.
Models were rarely needed; the public usually helped quickly on their own.
The larger the group, the less likely it is the victim will receive help.
The number of bystanders made no difference to how many people helped.

17. What hypothesis does these results support?
A drunk person would get less help than an ill victim

18. What hypotheses do these results not support?
People would help others of the same race first.
The larger the group, the less likely it is the victim will receive help.

19. Other findings
It took passengers a median time of 5 seconds to help an ill victim.
It took a median time of 109 seconds for a drunk victim to receive help (without a model).
What hypothesis does this support?
Seeing a model person helping would encourage others to help.

20. RESULTS – COMMENTS MADE BY FEMALE PASSENGERS
“I wish I could help him – I’m not strong enough.”
“It’s for men to help him.”
“I never saw this kind of thing before – I don’t know where to look.”
“You feel so bad that you don’t know what to do”

21. Discussion
One of the surprising findings in this study was that there was no diffusion of responsibility. The size of the group made no difference to how much help a victim received.
Why was this?

22. Piliavin et al. offered several explanations for this:
Passengers were trapped on the train and could not really leave the situation. On the street the results may have been different.
It was less effort for passengers to help. If they were sitting on the train anyway and were waiting for the next stop they may as well help.
Unlike the situation with Kitty Genovese, it was clear what the problem was for the bystanders who were sitting next to the victim.

23. Explanation:
Using data from the study, Piliavin et al. suggested a model that could explain how people respond to emergency situations.
It states that when bystanders are faced with a situation, a state of arousal is created (it could be fear, disgust, guilt, etc.). This arousal makes us feel uncomfortable.
We want to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling of arousal and we can do this in different ways.
Either we can help the person, or we can leave the situation.
What we do depends on the costs and rewards of choosing whether to help or not.
This model is called the arousal-cost-reward model

24. Effort, harm, embarrassment Disapproval, blame, guilt, judgement
Helping
Not helping
Costs
Effort, harm, embarrassment
Disapproval, blame, guilt, judgement
Rewards
Praise from others, feeling good about yourself
Being able to continue your other activities, less effort

25. EXPLANATION Costs of helping = disgust, embarrassment or harm.
Costs of not helping is less because nobody would blame another for not helping a drunk.
DECISION = NOT TO HELP BECAUSE THE COSTS OUTWEIGH THE BENEFITS.

26. EXPLANATION
Cost of helping is LOW. No perceived risk of danger or no disgust or embarrassment
Cost of not helping is HIGH – would feel guilty, others may judge you.
DECISION = WILL HELP BECAUSE THE BENEFITS OUTWEIGH ANY COSTS

27. EXPLANATION
Costs of not helping are LESS for women – others may not see it as a woman’s role to offer help in these circumstances
Costs of helping are HIGHER for women – greater effort, risk of danger.
Why did women help less?
DECISION = NOT TO HELP BECAUSE THE COSTS OF HELPING OUTWEIGH THE BENEFITS.

28. Piliavin et al. conclude that the reason why people choose to help is because they want to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling of arousal.
So, according to Piliavin, are people altruistic or not?
People are NOT ALTRUISTIC: Piliavin et al. state that helping is:
‘a selfish desire to get rid of an unpleasant emotional state’.

29. Conclusions
An ill person is more likely vto receive help than a drunk person
Men are more likely to help other men, than women are
People are slightly more likely to help someone of their own ethnic group, especially when they appear drunk
There is no strong relationship between size of group and likelihood of helping.
There is a small correlation between group size and helping behaviour is positive rather than negative. Therefore no support for diffusion of responsibility
The loger an incident goes on, the less likely people are to help, the more likely people are to leave an area and the more likely they are to discuss the event.

30. Evaluation
This study is a field experiment. Can you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this study?
Consider:
Ecological validity – Did this represent a natural situation?
Ethical issues – Consider which were broken and which were kept.
Validity – Was there any reason why recording accurate data from the observers would have been difficult?
Reliability – Could you repeat this study in exactly the same way?
Generalisability – Why does this study not represent all types of commuter?

31. Links to areas/perspectives
Social – It could be argued that the main approach that this study relates to is social. This is because the study investigated how other people (victims) and specific environments (emergency situations) alter our behaviour.

32. Link to key themes
The key theme here is ‘responses to people in need’.
The study suggests that diffusion of responsibility is not a factor when investigating whether people in need will get help.
However, it also suggests that the reason why people respond to others in need is not due to altruism but instead results from ‘a selfish need to remove an unpleasant emotional state’.