Psychologists and psychological experiments aren't necessarily always correct or valid. To my mind, one of the most recent examples of just how wrong a very famous psychological experiment was has been illustrated in not only Boston with the horrific bombings at the Boston Marathon, but in other places as well.
Two researchers, Bibb Latané and John Darley, became fascinated by the case of Kitty Genovese where a score or more of people in their apartments heard her screams as she was violently attacked and killed and they did nothing. It sounds unbelievable, but Latané and Darley saw the potential to test their hypothesis that the number of people actually determines whether or not someone acts in a situation of distress. Their experiments around 1965 after the murder of Kitty Genovese, as I recall, were carried out in subway cars in New York City
The scenario called for a variety of situations where individuals were in distress and on a subway train with varying numbers of passengers sitting in the car where they were. The researchers suspected that if they manipulated the number of passengers they could actually predict the actions regarding the bystanders in response to the passenger in distress. What they came up with, commonly called "The Bystander Effect," dictates that the more people who are present, the less likely it is that they will come to someone's aid. It was thought that somehow the social pressure of having others inactive caused inaction in each person. If only one or two other people were in the car, it was more likely that they would take action to help the individual in distress
Do you agree with this? I don't because we've seen too many instances where large groups of people have almost immediately gone to the aid of persons in distress and so have lone individuals within the group. We have seen individuals fall off subway platforms in New York City and an individual jumps onto the tracks to rescue them. They performed this heroic action as others stood on the platform watching them. No, this was not the only instance. There were other instances where persons fell or were pushed to the track bed and more than one bystander helped to rescue them
Now we have had an incredible, tragic ending this year to the Boston Marathon where two bombs were detonated and people were killed or injured. The bystanders did not stand by, but rushed forward to help those in this emergency situation. The same thing happened at a fertilizer plant in Texas where people from the community rushed to help. You might say these are extraordinary instances and really shouldn't be thought of as negating The Bystander Effect. But I don't agree. I also don't believe that the reason people didn't act in the subway situation was because they felt their assistance wasn't needed. Perhaps the New York City subway system presents a unique setting and experiments performed their may not apply to other real-life situations. That's also a possibility.
The setting is part of the experiment and how can you ever re-create that particular setting and all that it represents in a different environment and get the same result? Graduate students understand the need to hold certain parts of experiments to be so similar that the experiment can be changed in some other way while still maintaining the basic integrity of the hypothesis. I know that sounds like doublespeak, but what it really means is all the factors have to be there and they need to be so similar or you can't really apply the result to other situations. No I am not being condescending
How many instances have you seen where people have sprung into action even though there were others standing by who seemed frozen either by fear or societal pressure? Perhaps this recorded effect in social psychology really isn't an effect at all. Maybe there were underlying factors, such as a bias about New York subway riders, that affected the interpretation of the results. It was, after all, 1965 and a young woman had just been murdered without the neighborhood screaming for help for her or coming to her aid. Cold-hearted New Yorkers? Less than careful researchers? Remember everyone was still trying to figure out why so many Germans didn't do something about the Nazis and concentration camps. Where do you think those experiments on The Authoritarian Personality came from?
It reminds me of another experiment where the researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo attempted to replicate what happens to prisoners. The experiment, which was carried out at Stanford University, is known as, quite appropriately, The Stanford Prison Experiment. Without providing a withering amount of detail, let me just say that this experiment resulted in the researcher, Dr. Zimbardo, being so caught up in it that he actually thought his "prisoners" (college students who had been recruited for the experiment) were planning to "escape" from his prison. It was only when a fellow professor passed by and asked him what he was doing seated in a hallway at night that he realized he had become part of the experiment himself.
On a few other points, the experiment also raises rather serious ethical questions since some of the students experienced psychotic, temporary breaks and others may have had unpleasant experiences long after the experiment was over. How much follow-up was there anyway?
What about another experiment that was supposed to test whether or not people who were allegedly taking a test or waiting in a room for something suddenly saw smoke coming from under the door? This particular experiment as well as a few others in the 1950s were set up by Dr. Solomon Asch who was interested in conformity. Doesn't it sound a bit like The Bystander Effect was really about conformity? Can we think of an age that was more into conformity then the period from 1950 to 1960?
Then, of course, there is another very well-known experiment which was called Obedience to Authority where people thought they were giving painful electric shocks to a subject who was actually an actor employed by the researcher, Dr. Stanley Milgram. This experiment as well as The Stamford Prison Experiment should both be in the "Unethical Hall of Fame." The debriefing that was done after both of these experiments was woefully inadequate but the researchers managed to convince themselves they did a good job
Where does The Bystander Effect stand today? I suppose it is always going to be in social psychology textbooks and students will have to know about it, but they should also know about its shortcomings. One of the things they should know is that it is also important to look to see where experiments go wrong. I've always told my graduate students that when they read an experiment that they should look for the mistakes and the errors because they are always there
Thinking that the number of people is going to determine how much aid will be given to someone in distress is tantamount to thinking that people will not help when needed. I believe it's rather warped.