Misconceptions: Is There Truly Safety in Numbers During An Emergency?
In Summer 2023, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Social Psychology course completed a research project where they identified a misconception related to psychology, conducted both background research and an empirical project measuring belief in that misconception, and summarized their findings in a short blog post paper. The goal was to build student research skills as well as showcase the importance of thinking critically about information encountered in the media or in popular culture. This post is one of the papers submitted for that course. For more information on this project, just use the contact page to contact Dr. Stark.
By Jake Lohn
When we are in an emergency, it is logical to assume that the presence of more people is better than a few. After all, wouldn’t that make the chances of being helped greater? Sadly, however, the opposite has been found to be true, with multiple studies conducted on this false assumption. To further understand why people behave this way in emergencies and how common the belief in this misconception is, I conducted research on this subject throughout this course.
At the beginning of this course, we were instructed that we would be researching a misconception that was chosen by us instead of being assigned. Immediately, I knew that I wanted to study more about the misconception that the more people present in an emergency, the more likely someone will intervene. I already had some previous knowledge of this misconception from other courses I have taken, so I felt that deepening my understanding of the topic would be both interesting and beneficial.
To begin this process, I began searching for more information on this subject through standard means, like Google, so I could find potential leads to look into in databases. One of the primary sources of information I discovered while doing this was that Dr. Bibb Latané was by far the most significant contributor to studies on this misconception. Because of this, I used him as a foundation for future research into this topic which led to me learning about the original spark for his studies.
In 1964, a woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was murdered near a total of 38 people, but none of them intervened even though they were aware of what was happening (Manning et al., 2007). The behavior of these witnesses started a widespread discussion about the reason why no one intervened, which was mainly attributed to a lack of empathy among the bystanders. Something important to note, however, is that since the brain takes in a large amount of information throughout the day, many decisions and thoughts we have are unconscious. While this does work effectively for the most part, issues with this way of processing information can cause unusual behaviors, which led Latané and Darley to believe that some sort of psychological process may better explain the bystanders' behavior.
To determine if they were correct in their assumptions, Latané and Darley conducted an experiment involving male students at Columbia University in three different conditions (Latané and Darley, 1968). In the first condition, the subject was alone; in the second condition, the subject was paired with two confederates, who are actors used in experiments; finally, in the third condition, the subject was paired with two other subjects. In all of these conditions, the participants were asked to fill out questionaries while the room slowly filled with smoke in an effort to measure if the presence of other people alone is enough to reduce intervention rates by measuring the rate that the subjects would report the smoke. From this experiment, they found that students in the alone condition reported the smoke at a rate of 75%, compared to the confederate condition where it was only reported 10% of the time, and in the group of three participants condition where it was only reported 38% of the time. The results from this study seemed grim to me at first, but after further research, I learned that this behavior is not set in stone.
The study I found that changed my outlook on this situation was performed by Dr. Arthur Beaman and colleagues to determine if the behavior displayed in studies by Latané could be changed (Beaman et al., 1978). In their study, the researchers subjected introductory psychology students to either a lecture about the study mentioned previously or one about a different topic. After the subjects had listened to either of the lectures, they were sent with a female confederate, to simulate a group, near a male confederate who had gotten into a bicycle accident, and the helping rates of the participants were measured. Interestingly, those who had received the lecture about Latané and Darley’s study helped at a rate of 67% compared to 27% of those who didn’t. The results from this experiment made me hopeful that the behavior that people typically display in an emergency could be drastically reduced. However, with how widespread information is on topics like this in the present, shouldn’t the belief in this misconception be uncommon regardless?
Alongside my research into actual studies, I created survey questions that were paired with other questions from students in this course to measure the belief in this misconception. From this survey, I found that approximately 61.5% of respondents said they believed in this misconception in some manner, displayed in the graph to the right. Furthermore, about 64.1% of respondents said that they believed that someone more concerned with approval from others would intervene more often, displayed in the graph to the left. Although this misconception wasn’t mentioned previously, it was found by Latané and Darley that people who are less concerned with approval are actually more likely to intervene in an emergency compared to others (Latané and Darley, 1970). Regardless, this survey indicates that belief is still high in this misconception, which I found worrying. However, by educating others about it as Beaman and colleagues did, it is possible to counter the lack of intervention in emergencies that bystanders display in groups. After all, even if people in groups are less likely to intervene than those who are alone, constantly avoiding being part of a group is almost impossible in a species as socially reliant as humans.
References
Beaman, A., Barnes, P., Klentz, B., & McQuirk, B. (1978). Increasing helping rates through information dissemination: Teaching pays. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4(3), 406–411. https://doi.org/10.1177/014616727800400309
Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3), 215–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0026570
Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: why doesn’t he help? New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.
Manning, R., Levine, M., & Collins, A. (2007). The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping: The parable of the 38 witnesses. American Psychologist, 62(6), 555–562. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.62.6.555