Piliavin et al

• Diffusion of responsibility is the idea of feeling a reduced sense of personal responsibility, as other people are available to help in an emergency.
• Bystander apathy is the tendency to ignore or not intervene in a situation where someone is in need
• The aim of Piliavin’s study was to investigate bystander apathy and diffusion of responsibility in a realistic setting. She also wanted to investigate the effect of 4 factors on helping behaviour:

  1. type of victim - drunk or ill
  2. race of victim - black or white
  3. behavior of a ‘model’
  4. group size of bystanders
• Research method - field experiment

  experimental design - independent group design
• The study took place in a New York subway from Harlem to Bronx between 11 am and 3 pm. Estimated number of participants is 4450 of whom 55% were white and 45% were black. Mean number of people per carriage was 43 and mean number in the critical area was 8.5.
• Four teams of 4 students carried out the study. In each team, there would be 2 males and 2 females. The females were the observers. One male would be the victim while the other would be the model. Victims were always identically dressed and behaved the same way in every trial. 3 males were white and 1 was black.
• The victims were 26 to 35 years old and all males. 38 out of 103 trials, the victim appeared drunk by holding and smelling like alcohol wrapped in a brown bag. The remaining 65 trials, the victim appeared sober with a black cane.
• The models were all white males aged 24-29 years. Their job was to raise the victim in a sitting position and stay with them until the end of the ride. This was only done in model conditions.
• Trials were split in the following categories:

  1. critical / early - model stood in critical area and waited 70 seconds before helping
  2. critical / late - model stood in critical area and waited 150 seconds before helping
  3. adjacent / early - model stood in adjacent area and waited 70 seconds before helping
  4. adjacent / late - model stood in adjacent area and waited 150 seconds before helping
  5. no model condition - model didn’t help until the trial was over
• The female confederates recorded the level of bystander helping, which was opeationalised as:

  • time taken for first passenger to help
  • total number of passengers that helped
  • race, gender and location of each helper
  • verbal remarks made by any passenger
• Cane victim received help 62/65 times, 95%

  drunk victims received help 19/38 times, 50%
• In the no model trial, the white cane and drunk victim and the black cane victim received help every time, however the black drunk victim only received help 73% of the time.
• In the model trials, white cane victims received help every time. The white drunk victim received help 77% of the time, and the black drunk victim received help 67% of the time. Model trials weren’t done for black cane victims.
• Research doesn’t support diffusion of responsibility. People in groups of 7 responded faster than those in groups of 3.
• More verbal remarks were made in the drunk victim trials
• In 20% of the trials, people moved away from the critical area.
• Conclusion:

  The study found no diffusion of responsibility, however they found other factors that influence helping behaviour:

  • type of victim - more likely to help cane victim
  • gender of helper - men are more likely to help
  • similarity of helper to victim - more likely to help same race or gender
  • duration of emergency - longer an emergency continues, the less likely people are to help