University of the Philippines

Diliman, Quezon City

DARLEY AND LATANE’S BYSTANDER INTERVENTION IN EMERGENCIES:

DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY

A critical review
of a classic psychological study

Submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for
Psychology 115
Experimental Psychology

By
CORTES, Anna Veronica S.
2013-11133

To
Asst. Prof. Divine Love A. Salvador

On
2 June 2015
 Background Information of the Study

The experiment aimed to research on people’s helping behavior based on the

number of bystanders also aware of the emergency situation, predicting that the more
bystanders there were, the less likely and more slowly a person will provide help. The
experiment was conducted by an experimental assistant leading a participant into a room
with a pair of headphones and a microphone, giving them a cover story. The cover story
involved informing a participant that there would be a discussion between herself/himself
and other people regarding their personal problems and adjustments in the university;
placing them in separate rooms in order to protect their anonymity, that each would have
two minutes to speak, and that the experimenter would not be listening in on their
discussion. These measures were done in order to avoid having the experimenter at the
emergency situation and to be able to use the recorded tapes on the “emergency victim”
and the confederates. During the discussion, the victim would speak first for two minutes,
then it would be the participant’s turn. On the victim’s second turn, they (the victim) would
have an epileptic seizure while speaking, and the line would be cut off after 2 minutes.
Once the participants informed the experimenter of the emergency or when 6 minutes
had elapsed, the experiment was concluded, and the participants were given
questionnaires about their thoughts and emotions during the situation, scales of
Machiavellianism, anomie, authoritarianism, social desirability, social responsibility, and
vital statistics and socioeconomic data.
The (perceived) size of the group witnessing the situation was the independent
variable, with three conditions (i.e., one other person - the victim - with the participant
during the discussion, two other people - including the victim and a confederate, and five
other people - including the victim and four confederates); the three-person group
composition was also altered in that with female participants, one treatment group had a
female confederate, the other had a male confederate, and another one had a male
premedical student confederate, while the male participants heard the recording of a
female confederate. The dependent variable was the helping behavior as measured by
the time elapsed from the start of the seizure to the participant leaving the room to inform
the experimenter about the situation.
The results supported the experimenters’ hypothesis in that there were significantly
more participants from the two-group condition who reported the emergency than the six-
group condition, and there were more participants from the three-group condition who
reported the emergency than the six-group condition. The difference between the two-
group and the three-group conditions was not significant, however there were more
people from the two-group condition who reported the incident than the latter condition.
The experimenters concluded that perceived group size was the only thing that
affected people’s decisions of helping or not helping in cases wherein the bystanders
know the others exist, however unable to interact with each other. Personality variables
(as measured by the scales given to the participants at the end of the experiment) were
not effective in predicting helping behavior.

Critical Review
 There are some issues regarding the validity of the results of this experiment. Given
that the participants were college students in New York University taking introductory
psychology courses, this sample is not representative of the population of all humans,
therefore its results cannot be generalized for people studying in another university, living
in another state, another country, or another continent; that would need a bigger
representative sample.
Students were contacted to participate in the experiment, meaning they were pre-
picked by the experimenters from the population of students taking introductory courses
in psychology. This indicates no random selection of the participants, and there was also
no mention of the participants being randomly assigned to the treatment conditions. Since
there was no random selection nor random assignment, individual differences and
experiences could have affected their behavior. A person’s history could be one (e.g., a
participant has experienced seeing someone have seizures, or has a family member who
had seizures, or the participant her/himself had seizures), making the participant react
faster to the emergency situation. These differences could have been disregarded if the
experimenters used random sampling, random selection, and random assignment.
However, the experimenter bias was controlled when the experimenters (Darley &
Latane) weren’t present in the actual experiment, and only an experiment assistant was
there, and this experiment assistant did not stay in the same room as the participants,
leaving the participants no social cues as to how they should react and discounting the
Hawthorne Effect - participants behaving differently because they are being observed by
others (Heffner, n.d.). A manipulation check was done with the recording of the victim
having seizures, and it passed the judges’ (although it wasn’t specified who these
informed judges were) critic. Additionally, the experimenters omitted the data from
participants who were not convinced of the genuineness of the recording of the epileptic
seizure, removing possible outliers.
As for ethical issues, it was not indicated whether or not the participants voluntarily
participated in the experiment, nor was it stated that the participants signed a consent
form, given that the American Psychological Association had already published an Ethics
Code in 1952 (www.apa.org, 2010). This is needed as the knowledge that someone might
be having a seizure in the next room can give the participants discomfort.
Although the participants were deceived, it was justified in that the experimenters
had to set up an environment that simulates a person perceiving the existence of other
people (albeit unable to communicate with them) with them in an emergency situation,
and after the experiment, the participants were debriefed. The participants were deceived
since they were misled into believing the experiment was only a discussion, that there
were other people they were discussing with, that there was a person having seizures on
the other line, and they were not given full information regarding the experiment. The
experiment’s goals could not have been attained if deception was not used, since the
participant would know that there weren’t really other people on the other lines and that
there really wasn’t a person having seizures. They would also know that their response
to the situation is recorded, and that can possibly lead to an alteration of their behavior -
the observer effect.
The experimental set-up aimed to approximate that of the case of Kitty Genovese
(which also inspired this experiment and other experiments on diffusion of responsibility),
a woman raped and murdered outside her apartment in 1964 (McGill, n.d.). In Genovese’s
case, there were 38 witnesses to the crime that lasted for more than thirty minutes, but
the police were called too late and had arrived too late to save her(“50 Years Later,”
2014). Darley and Latane aimed to explain this behavior and determine its causes, and
allowed them to develop a model of helping as appended in Appendix A (McGill, n.d.).
The results of this experiment gave way to more research on helping behavior and
bystander intervention led by Darley and Latane. The experimenters discussed in their
study that the awareness and understanding of the bystander effect may help bystanders
overcome the phenomenon (Darley & Latane, 1968a). Moreover, this experiment was
expanded into a bystander being able to see the others and following social cues from
other people in the room with them - confederates (Darley & Latane, 1968b). An
experiment conducted by Darley with another group of researchers involved participants
only imagining they were with only one other person or were in a group. Those
participants who imagined themselves in a group were found to have felt significantly less
personal accountability and donated less than those who imagined themselves with
another person (Garcia, Weaver, Darley, & Moskowitz, 2002).
Hoefnagels and Zwikker (2001) also used Darley and Latane’s Model of Helping
Behavior in their study of domestic violence and child abuse, identifying how the
bystanders’ personal characteristics and perception affect their decision-making.
Additionally, Hensell (2009), the Health Program Manager of the Arizona Department of
Health Services Sexual Violence Prevention and Education Program (ADHS SVPEP),
wrote about the importance of knowing about the bystander effect:
Exploring the bystander effect is important because bystander actions and
reactions may affect both the risks of violence and consequences of violence for a
victim. A witness or bystander may deter a crime from occurring or their
intervention may help a victim if a violent attack is in progress (Hart & Miethe,
2008). (Hensell, 2009)

Critical Reflection

The discovery that 38 witnesses did just that - witness and look - and did not do any
action to help Genovese spiked people at that time to think that “society no longer cared
about people” (“50 Years Later,” 2014). People’s “conclusions ranged from ‘moral decay,’
to ‘dehumanization produced by the urban environment,’ to ‘alienation,’ ‘anomie,’ and
‘existential despair.’” “These explanations generally assert that people who fail to
intervene are somehow different in kind from the rest of us, that they are ‘alienated by
industrialization,’ ‘dehumanized by urbanization,’ ‘depersonalized by living in the cold
society,’ or ‘psychopaths’” (Darley & Latane, 1968a). However, these experiments on the
bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility have opened the possibility of other factors
affecting people’s helping behavior. The said factors such as group size showed that
personality factors have no effect of a person’s helping behavior. It doesn’t mean that
people who did not report the incident were apathetic and indifferent. In Darley & Latane’s
(1968a) experiment, even those participants who did not go out of their rooms felt anxious
as observed in their worry (the cognitive aspect of anxiety) when they asked the
experimenter how the victim having seizures was and in their emotionality (physiological
aspect of anxiety) as observed in their “trembling hands and sweaty palms.” Their
emotionality showed that they have not yet decided as to what they are going to do about
the situation. An avoidance-avoidance conflict was perceived by the participants in that
on one hand, they wanted to avoid the guilt of not being able to help the victim, and on
the other hand, they wanted to avoid looking foolish (for those in the three and six-group
conditions) in front of the large group (1968a).
I haven’t experienced seeing an emergency situation in public, but there were those
tiny situations where people in jeepneys going to UP do not know where they’re supposed
to alight. They usually ask the person seated beside them where the place (e.g., Quirino
Street, Alonso Hall, UHS) is, and usually these people do not know, and during the times
when I know the place, I found myself not speaking up of my own volition, thinking that I
might embarrass that UP student who did not know where the place was. I usually waited
for them to ask the jeepney driver. However, in cases where the jeepney driver (usually
SM North jeepney drivers) misinforms (I don’t know whether or not it was intentional) the
person, I usually talk to the person and tell them what I think is the easier route to their
destination.
There were also times when people lost in the UP campus ask around. Regardless
of the number of people around me, I take people (provided I do not have another place
to be in) to where they are supposed to be or wait (waiting sheds, for example). I think
this situation is similar to the two-people treatment condition in that the responsibility to
to help is only up to me (as the person they approached to ask help from), and even
though there were people around me, the responsibility was not diffused to them.
Most social experiments that involve deception aim to resolve social dilemma people
don’t usually consider or think about. As researchers, I think our goal is to be able to
explain people’s behaviors and to generalize these explanations, in order to be able to
predict behaviors. After this, we should increase people’s awareness about these
phenomena, so that they can better avoid the status quo when it comes to making
decisions (i.e., about helping other people), and it has already been found that people
who have learned about the bystander effect were more likely to help in emergency
situations (Beaman, Barnes, Klentz, & McQuirk, 1978).

References

www.apa.org. (2010). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct.

Retrieved from
www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx
Beaman, A. L., Barnes, P. J., Klentz, B., & McQuirk, B. (1978). Increasing Helping
Rates Through
Information Dissemination: Teaching Pays.Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 4(3),
406-411. Abstract retrieved from psp.sagepub.com/content/4/3/406.abstract
Darley, J. M., & Latane, B. (1968a). BYSTANDER INTERVENTION IN
EMERGENCIES:
DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY. Journal Of Personality And Social
Psychology, 8(4,
Pt.1), 377-383. doi:10.1037/h0025589
Darley, J. M., & Latane, B. (1968b). GROUP INHIBITION OF BYSTANDER
INTERVENTION
 IN EMERGENCIES. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3), 215-
221.
“50 Years Later, Kitty Genovese Murder Case Still Grips NYC, Nation”. (2014, March
11). CBS
New York. Retrieved from newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/03/11/50-years-later-kitty-
genovese-
murder-still-grips-nyc-nation
Garcia, S., Weaver, K., Darley, J., & Moskowitz, G. (2002). Crowded Minds: The Implicit
Bystander
Effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 843-853. Retrieved
from
www-personal.umich.edu/~smgarcia/pubs/crowded_minds.pdf
Heffner, C. L. (n.d.). Experimental Validity. Retrieved from
allpsych.com/researchmethods/
experimentalvalidity
Hensell, C. (2009). The Bystander Effect. Retrieved from
azrapeprevention.org/sites/azrapeprevention.
org/files/Bystander_Effect_oct_0.pdf
Hoefnagels, C. & Zwikker, M. (2001). The Bystander Dilemma and Child Abuse:
Extending the Latane
and Darley Model to Domestic Violence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 31,
1158-1183. Abstract retrieved from onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-
1816.2001.tb
02668.x/abstract
McGill, T. (n.d.). TO HELP OR NOT TO HELP. Retrieved
from www.edmondschools.net/Portals/3/
docs/Terri_McGill/READ-Bystander%20effect.pdf
McLeod, S. A. (2015). Psychology Research Ethics. Retrieved
from http://www.simplypsychology.org/
Ethics.html