The Bystander Effect is a Cognitive Phoenomena - 643 Words

The bystander effect is a social psychological phenomenon that concerns the behavior of individuals that, facing an emergency situation in which another person is subject to violence or needs help, do not intervene if other people are present. The effect has been tested in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latanà © (1968) after the murder of Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death by a maniac under the neighborhood’s eyes while she was walking home from her work at 3p.m. She asked for help for half an hour before she died, but the bystanders simply did not. Social psychologists tried to explain the bystanders’ behavior, focusing their explanation on two factors. According to the social influence principles, in an emergency situation, it has been assumed that bystanders monitor the behavior of other people to decide how to react. When nobody is doing anything, other bystanders tend to assume that help is not needed. Moreover, the diffusion of responsibility appears to pla y a role in this phenomenon. In this case, people feel less guilty if the guilt of their inaction can be shared with other bystanders (Levine Crowther, 2008). Balance Theory was proposed for the first time in 1946 by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider. It states that a balanced situation occurs when the feelings (or attitudes) ascribed to a certain person (A) are in agreement with (or are the same as) the feelings that are ascribed to an event (E), directly related to A. Thus, an unbalanced situation would