Police violence and the ‘bystander effect’ explained Since George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes on May 25, demonstrators across the country have gathered to protest police actions against African Americans. While most of the protests were calm, in several cities police officers have used force against demonstrators and journalists under the justification of crowd control. The sight of officers in riot gear beating marchers, firing rubber bullets and chemical- or pepper-based irritants, and shoving activists has reignited questions about accepted practices in the nation’s law enforcement community. Francesca Gino, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, studies leadership, the psychology of decision-making, and organizational behavior. GAZETTE: When a police officer acts inappropriately, a common defense is that it’s “one bad apple,” not an entire department. This is not a story in isolation. This research, I think, gets to [this] question.
How The Murder Of Kitty Genovese Created The Bystander Effect Wikimedia CommonsKitty Genovese whose muder would inspire the psychological phenomenon known as the bystander effect. At approximately 3:15 a.m. on March 13, 1964, a woman was murdered. Her name was Kitty Genovese. She was 28 years old, “self-assured beyond her years,” and had a “sunny disposition.” However, on that Friday evening, none of that mattered. As Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in an alleyway outside her home, the friends and neighbors she had lived next to for several years stood by, choosing not to get involved as she lay there dying. Around 2:30 a.m. on the night of her attack, Kitty Genovese left the bar she worked at and headed for home. A few minutes after she left, she stopped at a traffic light. At 3:15, Genovese pulled into the parking lot of the Kew Gardens Long Island Rail Road station parking lot, which was about 100 feet from her front door. Getty ImagesKitty at work at Ev’s bar. Upon being stabbed, Genovese screamed, running toward her home.
What Is the Bystander Effect? What Is the Meaning of Bystander Effect? The bystander effect, also known as bystander apathy, refers to a phenomenon in which the greater the number of people there are present, the less likely people are to help a person in distress. If you witnessed an emergency happening right before your eyes, you would certainly take some sort of action to help the person in trouble, right? While we might all like to believe that this is true, psychologists suggest that whether or not you intervene might depend upon the number of other witnesses present. How the Bystander Effect Works When an emergency situation occurs, the bystander effects holds that observers are more likely to take action if there are few or no other witnesses. Being part of a large crowd makes it so no single person has to take responsibility for an action (or inaction). As the participants sat filling out questionnaires, smoke began to fill the room. What Is a Real-Life Example of the Bystander Effect? Why Does It Happen?
Infographics Bystander Effect: What Is It and What You Can Do About It What the bystander effect looks like A little after 3 a.m. on March 13, 1964, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese parked her car and walked to her apartment in Queens, New York, after finishing her shift as a bar manager. Serial killer Winston Moseley was out to victimize someone that night. As Moseley reached her and began stabbing her with a hunting knife, Genovese screamed, “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! When lights in surrounding apartments flipped on and one man called out his window, the attacker ran and hid in the shadows. There was widespread public condemnation of the witnesses who did not come to Kitty Genovese’s aid. The related terms “bystander effect” and “diffusion of responsibility” were coined by social psychologists as a result of this research. The bystander effect describes situations in which a group of bystanders witness harm being done, yet do nothing to help or stop the harmful activity. According to the U.S. Common reasons for not coming to the aid of a victim include:
TODAYonline I refer to the news reports of the fatal traffic accident on Sunday (Dec 29) at Lucky Plaza. I applaud the Good Samaritans who unselfishly helped to lift up the car, pulled the victims out and attended to them. These are acts of true heroism. They encourage us to lend help to accident victims when needed and show that there are still compassionate people who don’t respond to accidents by whipping out their phones first to take videos and photos to circulate to their friends. In Sunday’s incident, one of the first things a bystander could do was to rush to the nearby Mount Elizabeth Hospital Accident and Emergency Department to seek help, as it would have the necessary medical equipment and trauma specialists on duty. This was crucial as the Singapore Civil Defence Force ambulances would take some time to arrive and the accident victims needed immediate medical attention and first aid. But this cannot be at the expense of not rendering help to victims.
Summary of the media shown in this segment Why we still look away: Kitty Genovese, James Bulger and the bystander effect | Society More than half a century later, the death of Kitty Genovese continues to remind us of the disconnect between what we believe about ourselves and how we really act under pressure. The murder of the 28-year-old outside her apartment in the Queens neighborhood of Kew Gardens in the early morning of 13 March 1964 rippled through New York City and around the world. How could a young, independent woman who lived on her own terms be so easily struck down? How could so many neighbors look on and turn away as she was stabbed repeatedly on the street and in her apartment building? Genovese’s killer, Winston Moseley, died in prison this week, bringing the case and its implications back into the spotlight. Two weeks after her murder, Rosenthal assigned a story with the damning headline: “Thirty-Seven Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police.” Take the story of Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax. For more than an hour he lay dying in a pool of his own blood as dozens walked by.
The 21st century bystander effect happens every day online If you’re going to fall, injure yourself and need help, where is a good place to do it? Should you choose a busy thoroughfare or a deserted backstreet? Statistics and experiments in social psychology will tell you that if you need help, you should avoid dropping in a busy street, even if hundreds of people are passing through. This is because of a phenomenon known as the bystander effect. And in the 21st century, when our thoroughfares are online and on social networks, millions of people are effectively passing each other by every minute. The presence of other people has long been shown to give rise to confusion about responsibility. One may be tempted to think that when a single person realises that the others aren’t acting on their responsibility, then the entire burden of responsibility falls to them. Updating the research The bystander effect has been well researched over the past 50 years but most experiments have taken place in controlled situations and focused on small populations.
Current affairs and the Bystander Effect A trip down memory lane Disturbing bullying reports can be used to teach kids about bystander intervention, advocates say Advocates say shocking new videos showing extreme bullying offer parents and educators an opportunity to teach young witnesses the importance of bystander intervention. "Targeting behavioural change from the bully is not as effective as targeting the bystander to make a culture shift," said Gordana Skrba of the Ontario Federation for Cerebral Palsy. A video posted Nov. 8 showed a 14-year-old Nova Scotia boy with cerebral palsy lying down in a stream as a girl steps on his back. About 20 students were watching, some filming on their phones. Then came last week's news about two videotaped incidents at St. Toronto police said Monday six teenage boys had been charged with assault and sexual assault. As these incidents are investigated, students, parents and teachers are grappling with difficult questions of how they could happen — and what young witnesses should do if they are present when they do. "Kids don't just make this stuff up.
How to reverse the Bystander Effect You see a shopper trip over in a busy street. Someone else can help. That’s what you tell your conscience. This is the Bystander Effect in action – the dilution of our sense of responsibility in the presence of other people – and it’s been demonstrated in numerous studies over many years. But life is complicated and psychologists have begun looking at the circumstances that can nullify or even reverse the effect. Two experiments were conducted using an online chat room for people with extreme emotional problems. In the baseline condition, each participant could see his or her name in the top left-hand side of the screen alongside other users’ names. This basic arrangement replicated the classic Bystander Effect – participants were less likely to post replies when there were more people logged into the forum. A second study built on these findings, but this time self-awareness was cued by the presence, or not, of a web-cam on the computer. Like this: Like Loading... Related In "Cognition"
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