Today in our crime system we often hear about a phenomenon called the bystander effect, which is something that we see a lot in court cases. The bystander effect often occurs in emergency situations and it happens when there’s a large amount of people present during an emergency situation, however there seems to be a diffusion of responsibility, and in the end no one helps the victim of the emergency (Gruman, 2016). In this blog post, I’m going to talk a little bit about my personal experiences dealing with the bystander effect.
A few months ago it was my friend’s 21st birthday so we decided to go to New Orleans for a special birthday trip. During this trip one night we decided to take a ghost tour of the City of New Orleans at night which I thought would be super fun considering me and my friends all love supernatural things and ghost stories. We had so much fun this night and as it was wrapping to an end our tour guide took us to the final spooky house and was telling us all about the ghost child that still lives in the house and when we were walking there, me and my friend spotted a man seizing on the ground.
This was a scary situation because I’ve never seen anyone in a complete seizure before and I had no idea what was going on. What I thought was strange about the situation was that absolutely no one stopped to help. Picture this, in the busy City of New Orleans at nighttime when people are exploring the city and there’s a man laying on the ground and seizing not a single person stop to check if he was okay. My friend’s birthday party had to stop to make sure that this man was okay. He seemed to be a homeless man on the street and we thought that maybe he was seizing due to a negative reaction to a certain drug or maybe due to the lack of the drug that he was dependent on. We hated to make these assumptions about a man just about how he looks, however it was necessary to assess the situation at the moment. We noticed that he had a super rapid heart rate and his pupils were not dilating when exposed to light. The only thing that we could think to do in the situation was to call 911 so while our ghost tour left us to take the group to the next haunted place . We stayed behind and waited for the Emergency responders to respond.
When the First Responders got to the scene we felt as though we did our job to the best of our abilities and parted with the man. The firefighters told us that he was a homeless man who was often seizing due to drug use and that they would give him something to make him feel better and make sure that he was safe for the time being.
This is a classic case of the bystander effect because while there was emergency with a bunch of people around in one of the busiest cities at night no one stop twice to see if this man needed care and attention because most people probably assume that someone else already called 911 or assume that somebody else was taking care of it and that it wasn’t their problem to deal with. My takeaway message is to always offer help in an emergency situation because you never know if no one is doing anything to help and if you could be that person to save that person’s life.
Applied Social Psychology : Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Jamie A. Gruman, Frank W. Schneider, and Larry M. Coutts . SAGE Publications . 2016