In a time where you can get sued by anyone and the age of trial by social media and biased news, sometimes not doing anything is the better self-serving option.
Yes, and you are especially at risk if you report a black person. For example, Amy Cooper did not act well, but she did not deserve national vilification and losing her job. If you wrongly report a white person, it won't become a national story. In this case the rapist was black.
This is very worrying. People are passive observers, detached from reality, who have been trained to unemotionally film, document, and report to the nearest authority without intervening.
Additionally, they have been trained not to intervene if a Black person is doing something, because that would be racist and they don't want to be all over Twitter and lose their jobs. What a splendid society we have created in the past 10 years.
Bystander effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ("a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present")
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility ("Because of the diffusion of responsibility, people feel that their need to intervene in a situation decreases as the number of other (perceived) witnesses increases. In an experiment that John Darley and Bibb Latané conducted in 1968, it was found that a subject was much less likely to help someone having a seizure when the subject thought that at least one other subject was also hearing the individual have a seizure.")
Er, the Bystander effect should be considered a victim of the replication crisis, because it hasn't been. Replicated, I mean -- quite the opposite [0]. Namely, it's been found that the more witnesses there are, the greater the chances of someone intervening.
The Kitty Genovese story should be further examined, too -- many apartment-bound witnesses called the cops, who (much like modern cops) took their sweet time, only arriving after it was already too late. 21st-century re-examination of the story, in fact, shows that newsies in '64 understood that they weren't telling the whole truth, but doing so would have "ruined the story". [1]
There's a huge cultural undercurrent in the West, trying to paint humanity as monstrous; this is a great example. It strikes me that the Bystander effect, as it's currently taught, is justification for neoliberal greed. If people are "actually" arseholes in large groups, then authoritarians, the superrich, and the like have moral license to be arseholes. It's science!
The Wikipedia entry for "Bystander effect" claims "These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology." citing Fischer et al https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0023304 - 'The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies.'
The abstract says "In a fixed effects model, data from over 7,700 participants and 105 independent effect sizes revealed an overall effect size of g = –0.35. The bystander effect was attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous (compared with non-dangerous), perpetrators were present (compared with non-present), and the costs of intervention were physical (compared with non-physical)." but I am unwilling to pay for access to read that paper.
Marie R. Lindegaard's publication "Bystander Intervention in Street Violence: Current Evidence and Implications for Practice" from https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7m9uv/download comments "Decades of subsequent research established the bystander effect as one of the best-replicated findings within social psychology (Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007). Recently, however, this apathetic view of bystanders has been challenged. In a meta-analytical synthesis of the experimentally-based bystander effect research field, Fischer et al. (2011) showed that the bystander effect does not generalize to dangerous emergencies."
Wikipedia and Lindegaard both quote Fischer, with rather different interpretations, and the Wikipedia example is clearly more suspect, quoting a 1969 experiment for its example.
Thank you for pointing this out!
I commented "the story was more parable than fact" to summarize the Genovese case, leaving full discussion up to the Wikipedia article.
It's worth pointing out that the majority of bystander effect studies are lab-based, and involve asking WEIRD [0] undergraduate students what they'd do in a hypothetical situation.
The cited study in the grandparent comment is an analysis of security camera footage in Amsterdam, Cape Town (!), and Lancaster, UK, and so is not synthetically asking people about what they reckon would happen, but is instead an examination of what does actually happen. Not that street fights in two very (and one relatively) typically Western cities don't represent a biasing limitation of sample, but it's still more applicable, IMO.
And exactly like the falsehoods told about the bystanders in the Kitty Genovese murder - "No Proof Anyone ‘Callously' Took Video of Rape on SEPTA Train, DA Says"
9 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 18.4 ms ] threadAdditionally, they have been trained not to intervene if a Black person is doing something, because that would be racist and they don't want to be all over Twitter and lose their jobs. What a splendid society we have created in the past 10 years.
Bystander effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ("a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present")
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility ("Because of the diffusion of responsibility, people feel that their need to intervene in a situation decreases as the number of other (perceived) witnesses increases. In an experiment that John Darley and Bibb Latané conducted in 1968, it was found that a subject was much less likely to help someone having a seizure when the subject thought that at least one other subject was also hearing the individual have a seizure.")
The Kitty Genovese story should be further examined, too -- many apartment-bound witnesses called the cops, who (much like modern cops) took their sweet time, only arriving after it was already too late. 21st-century re-examination of the story, in fact, shows that newsies in '64 understood that they weren't telling the whole truth, but doing so would have "ruined the story". [1]
There's a huge cultural undercurrent in the West, trying to paint humanity as monstrous; this is a great example. It strikes me that the Bystander effect, as it's currently taught, is justification for neoliberal greed. If people are "actually" arseholes in large groups, then authoritarians, the superrich, and the like have moral license to be arseholes. It's science!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190510231740/https://nscr.nl/e...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese#Accur...
The Wikipedia entry for "Bystander effect" claims "These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology." citing Fischer et al https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0023304 - 'The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies.'
The abstract says "In a fixed effects model, data from over 7,700 participants and 105 independent effect sizes revealed an overall effect size of g = –0.35. The bystander effect was attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous (compared with non-dangerous), perpetrators were present (compared with non-present), and the costs of intervention were physical (compared with non-physical)." but I am unwilling to pay for access to read that paper.
Marie R. Lindegaard's publication "Bystander Intervention in Street Violence: Current Evidence and Implications for Practice" from https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7m9uv/download comments "Decades of subsequent research established the bystander effect as one of the best-replicated findings within social psychology (Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007). Recently, however, this apathetic view of bystanders has been challenged. In a meta-analytical synthesis of the experimentally-based bystander effect research field, Fischer et al. (2011) showed that the bystander effect does not generalize to dangerous emergencies."
Wikipedia and Lindegaard both quote Fischer, with rather different interpretations, and the Wikipedia example is clearly more suspect, quoting a 1969 experiment for its example.
Thank you for pointing this out!
I commented "the story was more parable than fact" to summarize the Genovese case, leaving full discussion up to the Wikipedia article.
The cited study in the grandparent comment is an analysis of security camera footage in Amsterdam, Cape Town (!), and Lancaster, UK, and so is not synthetically asking people about what they reckon would happen, but is instead an examination of what does actually happen. Not that street fights in two very (and one relatively) typically Western cities don't represent a biasing limitation of sample, but it's still more applicable, IMO.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/no-proof-anyone-c...