Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What causes the bystander effect?
The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that one of them will help. Several factors contribute to the bystander effect, including ambiguity, group cohesiveness, and diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial of a situation's severity.
This genocide that occurred during World War II is one of the biggest examples of bystander effect on a mass scale. We sometimes think of bystander effect as applying to only one individual where one individual needs assistance and bystanders expect another bystander to help; however, this can apply on a bigger scale too with multiple victims. When Nazi officers were on trial they pleaded that if the Holocaust was as terrible as everyone said, then someone else must have known about it. Near the concentration camps, villages such as Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbruck, knew about what was going on inside the camp. When the Allies got to the camps they accused the villages nearby of making no attempt to save those in the camps. The Allies were angered that these nearby villages were waiting for someone else to come in and save the people in these camps. As a result, they forced these populations to clean up the corpses from the camps and bury them in mass graves as punishment for falling victim to this bystander effect.
To illustrate that people learn from watching others, Albert Bandura and his colleagues constructed a series of experiments using a Bobo doll. In the first experiment, children were exposed to either an aggressive or non-aggressive model of either the same sex or opposite sex as the child. There was also a control group. The aggressive models played with the Bobo doll in an aggressive manner, while the non-aggressive models played with other toys. They found that children who were exposed to the aggressive models performed more aggressive actions toward the Bobo doll afterward, and that boys were more likely to do so than girls.
Pluralistic ignorance can be contrasted with the false consensus effect. In pluralistic ignorance, people privately disdain but publicly support a norm (or a belief), while the false consensus effect causes people to wrongly assume that most people think like they do, while in reality most people do not think like they do (and express the disagreement openly). For instance, pluralistic ignorance may lead a student to drink alcohol excessively because she believes that everyone else does that, while in reality everyone else also wishes they could avoid binge drinking, but no one expresses that due to the fear of being ostracized. A false consensus for the same situation would mean that the student believes that most other people do not enjoy excessive drinking, while in fact most other people do enjoy that and openly express their opinion about it.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his "Bobo doll experiment". During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modeling.
Albert Bandura followed his 1961 study two years later with another that again tested differences in children's learning/behavior or actual performance after seeing a model being rewarded, punished, or experiencing no consequences for aggressive behavior towards a Bobo doll (here and following, ) .
The concept of behavioral modeling was most memorably introduced by Albert Bandura in his famous 1961 Bobo Doll Experiment. In this study, 72 children from ages three to five were divided into groups to watch an adult confederate interact with an assortment of toys in the experiment room, including an inflated Bobo doll. For children assigned the non-aggressive condition, the confederate ignored the doll. For children assigned the aggressive condition, the confederate spent the majority of the time physically aggressing the doll and shouting at it.
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but go along with it because they incorrectly assume that most others accept it. This is also described as "no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes". In short, pluralistic ignorance is a bias about a social group, held by the members of that social group.
A phenomenon known as false consensus is closely related to the idea of pluralistic ignorance, and refers to the incorrect belief that others are similar, when in reality they are not. For example, heavy drinkers will think that most others consume as much as they do, and will use this belief to justify their behavior. Berkowitz, an independent consultant who works full-time to promote these ideas, describes false consensus and pluralistic ignorance as "mutually reinforcing and self-perpetuating...the majority is silent because it thinks it is a minority, and the minority is vocal because it believes that it represents the majority" (p. 194).
The Bobo doll experiment (or experiments) is the collective name for the experiments performed by Albert Bandura during 1961 and 1963 when he studied children's behavior after they watched a human adult model act aggressively towards a Bobo doll, a doll-like toy with a rounded bottom and low center of mass that rocks back to an upright position after it has been knocked down. There are different variations of the experiment. The most notable experiment measured the children's behavior after seeing the human model get rewarded, get punished, or experience no consequence for physically abusing the Bobo doll. The experiments are empirical methods to test Bandura's social learning theory. The social learning theory claims that people learn largely by observing, imitating, and modeling. It demonstrates that people learn not only by being rewarded or punished (behaviorism), but they can also learn from watching somebody else being rewarded or punished (observational learning). These experiments are important because they resulted in many more studies concerning the effects of observational learning. The new data from the studies has practical implications, for example by providing evidence of how children can be influenced by watching violent media.
Later research was focused more on refining the hypothesis, rather than on denying its correctness. In one of the earlier studies, following the publication of Dollard et al.'s book, Pastore argued that the hypothesis should distinguish between arbitrary and non-arbitrary situations, as non-arbitrary situations decrease the aggressiveness of response. In this study, participants from a sample of 131 college students were presented with the verbal description of two types of situations, arbitrary and non-arbitrary. One of the arbitrary situation examples was being intentionally passed by the bus driver, while waiting at the correct bus stops. A non-arbitrary situation was described in one of the examples as being passed by the bus, while it was specifically marked as heading for a garage. The study results suggested that arbitrariness of the situation is an important factor in eliciting aggressive behavior in frustrating situations, with arbitrary situations inducing more aggression.
Prentice and Miller found that, on average, private levels of comfort with drinking practices on campus were much lower than the perceived average. In the case of men, they found a shifting of private attitudes toward this perceived norm, a form of cognitive dissonance. Women, on the other hand, were found to have an increased sense of alienation on the campus but lacked the attitude change detected in men, presumably because norms related to alcohol consumption on campus are much more central for men than for women. Research has shown that pluralistic ignorance plagues not only those who indulge, but also those who abstain: from gambling, smoking and drinking and among some who follow vegetarianism. The latter has found that pluralistic ignorance can be caused by the structure of the underlying social network, not cognitive dissonance.
Following that study, Albert Bandura tested whether the same was true for models presented through media by constructing an experiment he called "Bobo Doll Behavior: A Study of Aggression". In this experiment Bandura exposed a group of children to a video featuring violent and aggressive actions. After the video he then placed the children in a room with a Bobo doll to see how they behaved with it. Through this experiment, Bandura discovered that children who had watched the violent video subjected the dolls to more aggressive and violent behavior, while children not exposed to the video did not. This experiment displays the social cognitive theory because it depicts how people reenact behaviors they see in the media. In this case, the children in this experiment reenacted the model of violence they directly learned from the video.
A study done at the University of Princeton’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior suggests that the presence of the emotion influences the decisions made. The study uses a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to measure the brain waves of a subject when put into a difficult position. In this particular session, the subject was presented with a situation where she had to decide the fate of five people versus one person by the flip of a switch, and then decide the fate of five people versus one person by the physical acting of condemning a man to his death. The results of the fMRI stated that the decision of death by switch was easier than the decision of physically pushing a man to his death. It is theorized that the participant is being subjected to the emotion of anguish when faced with future possibility of physical condemning another person and therefore the brain enforces an “emotional block” to encourage the cessation of this behavior.
Bowlby believed attachment to be a primary biological drive to achieve proximity with a caregiver that transforms across child development to also encompass a psychological drive to find security by achieving a preferred interpersonal distance with an important caregiver he called an attachment figure. Insecure attachment patterns develop when caregivers are experienced as inconsistent or unpredictable, which necessitates the development of different strategies to achieve a sense of comfort and safety within an interpersonal setting. Furthermore, he posited that attachment figures function as a "secure base" that facilitate environmental eexploration and that "attachment behaviours" are triggered by perceived stress, danger or pain, and are thus "state dependent".
Nasally administered oxytocin has been reported to reduce fear, possibly by inhibiting the amygdala (which is thought to be responsible for fear responses). Indeed, studies in rodents have shown oxytocin can efficiently inhibit fear responses by activating an inhibitory circuit within the amygdala. Some researchers have argued oxytocin has a general enhancing effect on all social emotions, since intranasal administration of oxytocin also increases envy and "Schadenfreude". Individuals who receive an intranasal dose of oxytocin identify facial expressions of disgust more quickly than individuals who do not receive oxytocin. Facial expressions of disgust are evolutionarily linked to the idea of contagion. Thus, oxytocin increases the salience of cues that imply contamination, which leads to a faster response because these cues are especially relevant for survival. In another study, after administration of oxytocin, individuals displayed an enhanced ability to recognize expressions of fear compared to the individuals who received the placebo. Oxytocin modulates fear responses by enhancing the maintenance of social memories. Rats that are genetically modified to have a surplus of oxytocin receptors display a greater fear response to a previously conditioned stressor. Oxytocin enhances the aversive social memory, leading the rat to display a greater fear response when the aversive stimulus is encountered again.
University of Bath psychologist Linda Blair said the practice of toothing is down to the human need to take risks: "I think we protect ourselves too much in modern society, and risk is a human need. We need motivation. In some ways this is a tame way of picking people up, it's almost a natural follow up from randomly picking people's names out of the phone book. It's voluntary at all stages, and has choice. As long as that's there and it's legal, then people should be able to do what they want." Sue Peters of the Terrence Higgins Trust worried that anonymous sex made possible by toothing would cause an increase of sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia in the United Kingdom. University of Amsterdam sociologist Albert Benschop researched the hoax. He said toothing is "the next logical step" in dating and that the "old game is just adapting to new times". Benschop added that toothing is "just like picking up people in bars but without the silly time-consuming conventions of decorum that people are obliged to keep to these days. This is much more direct. You both know what you want." He also sees it as a way for people "to satisfy their need for intimacy. As long as it helps people out of loneliness and gives them more to enjoy in life, I think it's a very good development."
The "cultural cognition hypothesis" holds that individuals are motivated by a variety of psychological processes to form beliefs about putatively dangerous activities that match their cultural evaluations of them. Persons who subscribe to relatively individualistic values, for example, tend to value commerce and industry and are inclined to disbelieve that such activities pose serious environmental risks. Persons who subscribe to relatively egalitarian and communitarian values, in contrast, readily credit claims of environmental risks, which is consistent with their moral suspicion of commerce and industry as sources of inequality and symbols of excessive self-seeking.
Cognitive dissonance, a theory originally developed by Festinger (1957), is the idea that people experience a sense of guilt or uneasiness when two linked cognitions are inconsistent, such as when there are two conflicting attitudes about a topic, or inconsistencies between one's attitude and behavior on a certain topic. The basic idea of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory relating to attitude change, is that people are motivated to reduce dissonance which can be achieved through changing their attitudes and beliefs. Cooper & Fazio's (1984) have also added that cognitive dissonance does not arise from any simple cognitive inconsistency, but rather results from freely chosen behavior that may bring about negative consequences. These negative consequences may be threats to the consistency, stability, predictability, competence, moral goodness of the self-concept, or violation of general self-integrity.
Sherif was a founder of modern social psychology, who developed several unique and powerful techniques for understanding social processes, particularly social norms and social conflict. Sherif's experimental study of autokinetic movement demonstrated how mental evaluation norms were created by human beings. Sherif is equally famous for the Robbers Cave Experiments. This series of experiments, begun in Connecticut and concluded in Oklahoma, took boys from intact middle-class families, who were carefully screened to be psychologically normal, delivered them to a summer camp setting (with researchers doubling as counselors) and created social groups that came into conflict with each other.
Rayner and Watson claimed to have studied over 500 children, with the Little Albert experiment being their only attempt at a psychological experiment (it would not be categorised as an experiment today). The basis of their study was conditioning a 9-month old baby, referred to as "Albert", to fear a white rat, which had previously been a neutral stimulus. The fear was generalized to other white, furry stimuli, such as fur coats, rabbits, and a Santa Claus mask. The results of the study were published in the "Journal of Experimental Psychology". Despite its prominence, the "Little Albert" study would be deemed highly unethical by modern standards.
The "bystander effect" with its connotations of the innocent bystander being killed is also mediated by gap junctions. When cells are compromised due to disease or injury and start to die messages are transmitted to neighboring cells connected to the dying cell by gap junctions. This can cause the otherwise unaffected healthy bystander cells to also die. The bystander effect is, therefore, important to consider in diseased cells, which opened an avenue for more funding and a flourish of research. Later the bystander effect was also researched with regard to cells damaged by radiation or mechanical injury and therefore wound healing. Disease also seems to have an effect on the ability of gap junctions to fulfill their roles in wound healing.
Also known as the bystander effect, bystander apathy occurs when, during an emergency, those standing by do nothing to help but instead stand by and watch. Sometimes this can be caused by one bystander observing other bystanders and imitating their behavior. If other people are not acting in a way that makes the situation seem like an emergency that needs attention, often other bystanders will act in the same way. The diffusion to responsibility can also be to blame for bystander apathy. The more people that are around in emergency situations, the more likely individuals are to think that someone else will help so they do not need to. This theory was popularized by social psychologists in response to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder. The murder took place in New York and the victim, Genovese, was stabbed to death as bystanders reportedly stood by and did nothing to stop the situation or even call the police. Latane and Darley are the two psychologists who did research on this theory. They performed different experiments that placed people into situations where they had the opportunity to intervene or do nothing. The individuals in the experiment were either by themselves, with a stranger(s), with a friend, or with a confederate. The experiments ultimately led them to the conclusion that there are many social and situational factors that are behind whether a person will react in an emergency situation or simply remain apathetic to what is occurring.
At the time it was believed that radiation damage to cells was entirely the result of damage to DNA. Charged particle microbeams could probe the radiation sensitivity of the nucleus, which at the time appeared not to be uniformly sensitive. Experiments performed at microbeam facilities have since shown the existence of a bystander effect. A bystander effect is any biological response to radiation in cells or tissues that did not experience a radiation traversal. These "bystander" cells are neighbors of cells that have experienced a traversal. The mechanism for the bystander effect is believed to be due to cell-to-cell communication. The exact nature of this communication is an area of active research for many groups.
An alternative explanation has been proposed by Stanley Milgram, who hypothesized that the bystanders′ callous behavior was caused by the strategies they had adopted in daily life to cope with information overload. This idea has been supported to varying degrees by empirical research.