8.1 Introduction. Text in black is from the DD307 course book.

Transcription

1 Text in black is from the DD307 course book. 8.1 Introduction In emergency situations with multiple bystanders, researchers have found: Diffusion of responsibility : each bystander feels less accountable as an individual than if they were the only one; Rejection of blame : they feel others (not themselves) are to blame for not taking action; A feeling that other bystanders may already have helped : i.e. they probably don t need to do anything; The conclusion is that with more bystanders it is: Less likely that anyone will offer help; Likely to take longer for anyone to offer help. Darley and Latane (1968) studied bystander intervention using an experimental approach : Placed the subject in an apparent group of bystanders they could not see anyone but could hear them one at a time through headphones, in reality these were tape recordings; Created an apparent crisis one of the group had an epileptic fit; Measured the likelihood of the subject reporting the problem and how long it took them. Operationalising all the possible factors that could affect behaviour in this kind of situation is difficult if not impossible : The social context (inc. economic) of a real crisis and the events leading up to it; The demographics (age, gender class, race ) of those involved; The attitudes in the social groups they are part of. etc. etc. Cherry (1995) criticised the assumption that social psychology can be studied by generalising behaviour of individuals and groups while ignoring social context ; She was writing during the ongoing crisis in mainstream social psychology (this was considered to over rely on experiment);

2 Mainstream approaches were challenged by those that saw social and historical context as important and that used qualitative methods ; Feminist psychology was expressing concerns about how women s experience was often distorted by research and theory; Reading 8.1 Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility (Darley and Latané, 1968) Context A key event in bystander research was the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese (KG) in New York (1964): apparently 38 bystanders in nearby apartments could hear that there was an attack ; they knew that others were aware but had no communication with them; nobody called for help. Three factors were identified for study: Diffusion of responsibility if only one bystander all the pressure to act is on them, if more, the pressure on each is less; Possibility that others have already intervened intervening would cause more confusion, harm or just be redundant; Diffusion of blame for doing nothing if everyone s to blame, no individual is punished. Experiment The experiment placed subjects (59 female, 13 male) individually in a group of bystanders in reality these were not visible to the subject who could only hear them one at a time, and in fact were tape recordings; after a round of sharing concerns about starting university, the recording for one of the group suggested they were having an epileptic fit The dependent variable was the time taken for the subject to report the emergency ; Two independent variables were studied: the number of bystanders 2, 3, or 6, including the subject; the group makeup of 3 person groups e.g. combinations of male and female bystander, male/female subject and male victim; They hypothesised that the more bystanders involved, the less likely it was that help would be requested and the longer this would take ; Findings The subject reported the emergency in 85% of 2 person groups (i.e. subject and victim only), declining to 31% in 6 person groups ; The gender of other bystanders or whether they supposedly had medical training had no significant effect on response speed;

3 Male and female subjects showed similar response speed; Subjects reported common thoughts including Not knowing what to do, thought it was a fake, didn t know what was happening ; They appeared to generally believe the fit was real ; They were not apathetic most inquired as to the condition of the victim when the experiment was halted (whether they had reported it of not); They hadn t decided not to respond just hadn t made up their minds; The researchers surmised that Subjects had few coherent thoughts when they thought the other participant was having a fit; They were in a conflict situation where they wanted to avoid looking like they over reacted, and also felt guilt/shame at not reacting ; Despite theories in the newspapers this was not just due to apathy or indifference, but perhaps to: Fear of personal safety through getting involved; Presence of other bystanders; They concluded that: People who fail to intervene are not abnormal : the explanation that bystanders who fail to intervene are psychopathic, apathetic, abnormal people is attractive because is makes us feel that we re not like them, so we would probably intervene to help ; Personality is not likely to be an important factor in intervention it s more likely to be the number of bystanders ; This proposes a situational rather than dispositional explanation. 8.1 Commentary Two key positive features: This paper explains the social context, explains why they did the research (letters to the paper, puzzlement in society as to why this happened); Consequently the study has social relevance, and is historically and socially situated ; This helps readers understand situated influences, though the report doesn t reveal the values and beliefs underlying their research (e.g. they may have been concerned.and thought they could do something to help prevent future occurrences of failure to intervene); The researchers challenged popular opinion namely that New Yorkers had become uncaring and apathetic or the bystanders were vicariously satisfying sadistic impulses ; They claimed that when people feel they are more normal if others evil actions are explained by personality defects ;

4 This self serving rationalisation leads them to believe that they would have behaved differently; Darley and Latane claimed most people would behave in the same way a social explanation, based on situational factors (e.g. number of bystanders) not an intra psychic one ; Personality was found to be irrelevant, participants were distressed and confused, not apathetic. However they assumed that all important factors had been operationalised in their experiment; In fact people s behaviour is complex, not simple cause and effect; Social and personal factors complicate the situation and can t be built into experiments ; Experiments may de contextualise behaviour over emphasis on value freedom and objectivity may mean these important factors are eliminated or ignored; Cherry has two main critiques of Darley and Latane: Women are under represented in psychological research (most participants in the past were male, male behaviour was normalised with female behaviour as the other ); Experimental research can t really be objective ; Should it be anyway? Feminist researchers claim the social and cultural factors in the research context must be studied including the researcher s background and context ( reflexivity ); Reading 7.2 Kitty Genovese and culturally embedded theorizing (Cherry, 1995) Hunches and explanations are affected by the researcher s own experience and social assumptions of the place and time; The social scientist is not an isolated objective being, but is public and passionate, trying to explain the meanings behind what they observe ; These meanings are grounded in their own experience and from being debated publicly (both agreement and disagreement); This contrasts with the goals held by experimental science of predicting behaviour; Link between historical events and theories Historical events and the theories used to explain them are linked: Example: bystander intervention in the KG case framed historically by Darley and Latane as failure of bystanders to intervene ; These challenged assumptions that the situation was due to bystander apathy, selfishness or media voilence, explaining it instead through situational factors :

5 Group inhibition; Diffusion of responsibility; Diffusion of blame. Experimental reductionism may lose social context Darley and Latane identified factors such as group size as reflecting the belief that social psychology is primarily about people s influence on one another; However by stripping the phenomenon of bystander intervention to bare essentials to operationalise it, they eliminated socio cultural factors ; This suggests that in constructing an explanation for an event we may narrow our view too far, ignoring larger categories of behaviour; At the time of the KG incident people did not typically intervene in violence towards women (a cultural norm); Only one respondent afterwards referred to gender (didn t want to intervene in a lover s quarrel ); This caused the event to be reduced to an emergency where nobody intervened ; Many subsequent experimental studies into bystander intervention focused on emergencies such as fire, apparent injury etc. ignoring gender as a factor and even ignoring the situation of someone being attacked, The social context in the 1960s U.S. (at least) was that violence against women was not a social concern (therefore tolerated/condoned/taken for granted?); Experimental reductionism may lose meaning Brownmiller (1975) saw it differently, pointing out that this wasn t just a crime where nobody intervened, but that KG was first viciously attacked and then raped i.e. what previous analyses ignored was that this was a sexual crime in which nobody intervened ; Cherry emphasises that it was a case of violence directed by a man towards another woman, where nobody intervened This suggests that research that creates theories may do so at the expense of losing meaning, e.g. here gender violence was ignored to create a theory of general intervention the attack on a woman meaning was lost; Situated knowledge 70 s women s movement The womens movement raised awareness of violence against women ; At the same time social psychology was moving towards being an interpretive rather than predictive science ; This enabled Cherry to consider whether the fact a woman was attacked was a factor in helping behaviour ; She had been trained to remove the social context to make a purer research question;

6 But personal experience of the women s movement reformed her view, causing her to think about gender relations within wider power structures ; She started to question the value of social experiments, which do not test hypotheses but instead describe specific knowledge in a social context (that of the researcher) ; This suggests that social experiments can add to our understanding so long as they don t de contextualise the phenomena they study ; Two earlier studies had looked at the KG case as one of a woman being attacked rather than simple bystander intervention : Borofsky et al. (1971) : in an experiment with male/female pairs (male attack on male, male attack on female, female attack on male, female attack on female): no males intervened to stop a male attacking a woman; more male intervention in the other cases; women unlikely to intervene in any of the cases; The researchers suggested males didn t intervene because they enjoyed watching a man injure a woman (!!!???) Shotland and Straw (1976) staged male attacks on females and found more intervention if bystanders thought the couple were strangers than if they thought they were married (65% vs 19% intervened); Bystanders also assumed the couple were in a relationship if there was no evidence to the contrary; The researchers recommended social control male violence to female strangers would be reduced if people locally know each other better; However the level of violence within relationships was underestimated (men beating up wives, wives couldn t legally claim rape at the time). Over time (1960s to 1980s) research moved from bystander intervention to gender role expectations ; KG s murder could more easily be seen more as an example of male violence towards women (a social problem) than of bystander intervention (a behavioural problem); Cherry also found evidence that class and race had been part of the social discourse concerning KG reporting in the New York Times ignored the fact that her attacker was black and she was white because it wasn t considered relevant, though this was widely known (the fact he was black may have been taken for granted by readers...); reporting focused on the fact that the incident had happened in a middle class area ; These factors would not have been incorporated in experimental situations, which concentrated on bystanders rather than those involved. But by focusing only on violence towards women, researchers can fall into the trap of narrowing their view again, and ignoring other social factors such as poverty, race, class etc. that operate at community rather than individual levels ;

7 Later theories suggest that lack of community was at the root of the KG incident (reduced human contact, lack of control over one s environment); Question whose community should be preserved? Claims that lack of community/lack of bystander intervention was more common in poorer communities; Rosenthal (1987) noted that many people would ignore the plight of the homeless people on New York streets; Cherry proposes that whole communities (women, the poor, children, etc.), not just individuals, are susceptible to violence, and that social psychology needs to take a political approach to explaining why we don t intervene in these cases. 7.2 Commentary Cherry emphasises the social context (violence towards women accepted, police reluctant to intervene in domestic violence etc.) over the behavioural factors that bystander intervention research focused on; She points out that these were missing in Darley & Latane s experimental conditions KG was attacked and raped this is often not reported ( e.g. including the OU course book for DD131 Introducing the social sciences part 1!! ); This shows gender and power relations are sometimes ignored in experimental social research Darley and Latane ignored the salient feature that a man attacked a woman in their bystander intervention research; There is therefore a danger that meaning is lost when societal factors are omitted ; Explanations for behaviour may only be found when the social context is considered; Not all experiments are lacking in this regard e.g. Borofsky (1971), Shotland and Straw (1976) but qualitative methods are more likely to be useful for studying social phenomena; Methods include ethnographic studies, interviews, narrative analysis ); Cherry claims that unquestioned inequalities (poverty, race, class) in 1960s U.S. society were invisible to white, middle class researchers ; She points out more examples of situated knowledge 1960 s U.S.: violence towards women accepted, her own (experimental) training to strip away the social factors; how this changed when she encountered feminist psychology; This shows that epistemology can change in time (what knowledge is taken as valid); It also shows the critique of objectivity and the importance of reflexivity (her realisation that she had changed her views);

8 Critique of objectivity : Male preoccupation with dispassionate, objective view of the research material may hide the researcher s own values and belief; Standpoint epistemology includes the researcher s perspective it s impossible to completely prevent it affecting the knowledge that is produced from research; Harding (1991) argues for strong objectivity ( reflexivity in feminist research), i.e. rigorously examining the researchers values and beliefs to understand how they may affect the findings; It s also important to assess the role of the theory/perspective/method that the researcher has chosen epistemological reflexivity ); If all of these affect the way that the object of research is interpreted, then it s clear there can be no one objective explanation ; Social constructionist epistemology views this as a given, explanation is a combination of researcher, participants and sociocultural context ; Recently the study of bystander intervention has been replaced with study of helping behaviours (e.g. altruism), but the methodologies used are still experimental rather than critical or feminist ;