Anybody heard about the "Bystander Effect"?

[Fan of Arabian horses]

Hi!

While helping my wife with transforming a speech into an understandable text I came across an expression: "Bystander Effect". It has to do with reasons for help others in emergency situations. Have anbody ever heard about this interesting theory?

[Yankee]

Hi Michael

Interesting topic. What sort of speech is your wife writing?

I'd heard the term "bystander effect" long ago, but had to google it to remind myself where/why I'd heard it. (Wikipedia has a write-up.)

It seems a logical theory to me. Don't you think it's often the case that, in a group or crowd, people just assume that someone else will take (or has already taken) the initiative to do something when something clearly needs to be done? It seems to me I've seen that kind of behavior pretty often.

Amy
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Amy
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ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[Fan of Arabian horses]

Hi Amy!

I enjoy that you can remember having heard or read about the "bystander effect" as it seems to be a rather specific theory and I myself heard about it the first time.

Well, my wife is working as a clerk (male/female) in a research department in a common office. The task of the department is to collect information about police?s work while the NS-time and to offer them to police- and administration academies. Some weeks ago her department accomplished a work-shop concerning their theme. Of course they also invited some guest-speaker who lectured on several themes. For a better presentation of their work her chief decided to make a book about the work-shop in which also the speeches of their guests will be printed. So the recorded the speeches and my wife have to make understandable or printable texts of them. You surely can imagine that it isn?t easy to transform free speeches of some professors into clear expression. As my wife isn?t proficient in that and I had written reports for newspapers some years ago she asked me to help her.

I took me some repeats of reading the speeches that my wife straightly wrote from records as there had been many referrings to other authors and specialists and to some previous speakers and to foils.

A rather interesting point had been the "bystander effect" which -like the speaker mentioned: don?t have any good translation into German- but gives a logical explanation what in human?s behave sometimes prevent to help others who experience an emergency. The speaker brought up an example form the 1960?s: the murder of a woman in the New Yorker townpart Kew Gardens. The whole offend lastet about 35 minutes and the murderer returned to the offer twice. 14 days after a journalist reported that all in all 38 people had watched that situation and none of them even called the police or helped in any way. As the speaker told furtheron there must have been a big discussion in the US about: "How that might be possible" and two psychologists investigated on this and figured out that rather interesting theory.

Well, I won?t inquire anyone here, don?t expect any answer and won?t insert bad conscience. But, how often could everybody experience seeing a person in an emergency and normally you would have helped but experienced a border that possibly disabled you to help? And from what reasons?

Amy, like you mentioned, the "bystander effect" gives a pretty logical explanation for that phenomen.

Michael