"The Bystander Effect" is defined as a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present. (source).
Basically, the idea is that if someone is in trouble or needs help, people are less likely to help when others are around because they believe someone else will do it. On the flip side, if they are the only person around they are much more likely to help out. In my high school AP Psychology class our final project was to do a social experiment based on this idea. This is what we found.
We started the project by going over what was and wasn’t ethically okay to do and then planning out where we were going to go around our town and what exactly we were going to do.
Our first step/scene (since we were going to make this into a video at the end) was to stage a fight between my boyfriend and I in an area of school with a lot of student traffic during a lunch block, essentially free time for many students. We angled ourselves so that it would look and sound real to people passing by. The camera was hidden behind a wall so the students couldn’t see it, but it could see them and us. We told the nearby teachers what was going on so they were aware and nobody got in trouble.
We filmed many times throughout the block of time with different students walking by each time. My boyfriend would start yelling at me and then would proceed to “hit” me. Don’t worry, he never touched me, but to others, it came off as very real. When tons of students were walking by, you could hear the entire hall go quiet and everyone turned their heads to watch the fight; amazement, shock, and horror passed on their faces but nobody stopped to help. A couple pulled out their cell phones to record the fight. It was only when we filmed with two people nearby did someone say something.
Next, we went to my friend’s house and did some special effects makeup to make it look as if we had gotten beat up or had been in an accident. We each took turns walking around different areas of our town, with someone consistently secretly filming. Out of everywhere we had gone, only three people stopped and asked if we were okay, and in two of those instances, it was because those people knew us. The other person who asked if we were okay was a little girl who tugged on her mom’s sleeve and to see if we were alright. They were the only two close to us on the sidewalk.
Everyone we interacted with or was going to be shown on film in our class was debriefed and asked if they were okay with being on camera. Most people were very shocked to learn that we weren’t actually hurt, and nobody was mad that we did this experiment. Instead they all were surprised to find out that hardly anybody had checked in on us.
Throughout the experiment, we didn’t exactly get the results we wanted, but we got the results we expected. We wanted people to step in when my boyfriend was “hitting” me, and we wanted people to care when it looked like we were hurt. But this wasn’t the case, obviously. It perfectly demonstrated the Bystander Effect because it showed that when a lot of people are present the individual most likely won’t intervene, but if they are by themselves, they will. The moral of the story is, when it looks like someone is in trouble, step up and at least offer to help. Chances are, nobody else has or is going to. It never hurts to be caring.
