From Empathy to Apathy: The Bystander Effect Revisited - PMC
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Curr Dir Psychol Sci<br>. 2018 Aug 1;27(4):249–256. doi: 10.1177/0963721417749653
From Empathy to Apathy: The Bystander Effect<br>Revisited
Ruud Hortensius<br>Ruud Hortensius
1Institute of Neuroscience and<br>Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Glasgow
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1,✉, Beatrice de Gelder<br>Beatrice de Gelder
2Department of Cognitive Neuroscience,<br>Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University
3Department of Computer Science,<br>University College London
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2,3
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1Institute of Neuroscience and<br>Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Glasgow
2Department of Cognitive Neuroscience,<br>Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University
3Department of Computer Science,<br>University College London
✉Ruud Hortensius, Institute of Neuroscience<br>and Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 62 Hillhead St.,<br>Glasgow, G12 8QB, Scotland, United Kingdom E-mail:<br>ruud.hortensius@glasgow.ac.uk
Issue date 2018 Aug.
© The Author(s) 2018
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons<br>Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which<br>permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work<br>without further permission provided the original work is attributed as<br>specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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PMCID: PMC6099971 PMID: 30166777
Abstract
The bystander effect, the reduction in helping behavior in the presence of other<br>people, has been explained predominantly by situational influences on decision<br>making. Diverging from this view, we highlight recent evidence on the neural<br>mechanisms and dispositional factors that determine apathy in bystanders. We put<br>forward a new theoretical perspective that integrates emotional, motivational,<br>and dispositional aspects. In the presence of other bystanders, personal<br>distress is enhanced, and fixed action patterns of avoidance and freezing<br>dominate. This new perspective suggests that bystander apathy results from a<br>reflexive emotional reaction dependent on the personality of the bystander.
Keywords: bystander effect, helping behavior, empathy, sympathy, personal distress
When people are asked whether they would spontaneously assist a person in an emergency<br>situation, almost everyone will reply positively. Although we all imagine ourselves<br>heroes, the fact is that many people refrain from helping in real life, especially when<br>we are aware that other people are present at the scene. In the late 1960s, John M. Darley and Bibb Latané<br>(1968) initiated an extensive research program on this so-called “bystander<br>effect.” In their seminal article, they found that any person who was the sole bystander<br>helped, but only 62% of the participants intervened when they were part of a larger<br>group of five bystanders. Following these first findings, many researchers consistently<br>observed a reduction in helping behavior in the presence of others (Fischer et al., 2011; Latané & Nida, 1981). This<br>pattern is observed during serious accidents (Harris & Robinson, 1973), noncritical<br>situations (Latané & Dabbs,<br>1975), on the Internet (Markey, 2000), and even in children (Plötner, Over, Carpenter, & Tomasello,<br>2015).
Three psychological factors are thought to facilitate bystander apathy: the feeling of<br>having less responsibility when more bystanders are present (diffusion of<br>responsibility), the fear of unfavorable public judgment when helping<br>(evaluation apprehension), and the belief that because no one else<br>is helping, the situation is not actually an emergency (pluralistic<br>ignorance). Although these traditional explanations (Latané & Darley, 1970) cover several<br>important aspects (attitudes and beliefs), other aspects remain unknown, unexplained, or<br>ignored in studies of the bystander effect, including neural mechanisms, motivational<br>aspects, and the effect of personality. Indeed, the only hit for the keyword<br>“personality” in a recent overview (Fischer et al., 2011) was for journal names in the reference list (e.g.,<br>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)....