Bystander Effect Analysis

The short video provided in the prompt is of a man falling onto train tracks in a relatively crowded subway station as a train approaches quickly. To the surprise of many viewers, only one onlooker has the gumption to jump onto the tracks and attempt to save this man from his seemingly certain death. Luckily, the lone responder is able to pull the man off the tracks just in time to help him get out of harms way. If this bystander had not acted in the way that he did, I highly doubt we would be assigned this video for this week’s essay. The lack of people willing to help the man in peril can mostly be attributed to the well studied bystander effect, a social psychological phenomenon, which refers to “when the presence of others discourages an …show more content…
In my research, I stumbled upon a short story of science fiction which illustrates a tale of a neuroscientist who is treating a patient with obsessive compulsive disorder. The story begins with the doctor inserting a small microchip into the brain of the patient (a chip that actually exists, in fact). After the procedure and when the patient has come to, the surgeon explains that they have fixed the problem of OCD but they have also enabled this chip with the ability to monitor and control all of the patient’s actions. The illusion of free will be maintained but from that point on, the patient no longer has free will. Then the surgeon bids farewell and sends him out the door. In the following months, the patient believes what the surgeon has said and lives his life as if he is not in control: he becomes self indulgent and negligent in his decisions. Eventually, after a repeated pattern of indulging in his negative features, the man has gotten himself into trouble with the law. So he is arrested and put on trial, where he claims that his free will has been taken away and he was not acting on his own accord. So the judge calls the neurosurgeon to the stand, where the surgeon says that this was nothing more than a joke and was not meant to be taken seriously. Now by this example, you can see that the neurosurgeon has changed the …show more content…
So they set up an experiment where half of the participants were made to read a text that had little to do with free will, while the other half read a text that stated that free will was an illusion. Following their reading, they were given a test where it was made apparent to them that there was a flaw in the computer that would reveal the answer to them, but that this was cheating. It was found that the people who were given the text that made free will out to be illusory, were much more likely to cheat on the test. This test shows the potentially detrimental consequences of the general public being told that they do not have free