What Is The Bystander Effect

In the article, The Science Of ‘Paying It Forward’, Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy tackles on the actions of the individuals and the corresponding relationship between the observers and receivers. They recruited over 600 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for their experiment. To their surprise, they encountered what’s known as the “bystander effect.” Once someone receives help from a person, the bystander reads the situation as if there’s no need of additional help, thus leading to the term the “bystander effect.” Besides the negative effect of some participants, there were positive effects as well that receiving help from others allowed you to have a rapturous feeling to be generous toward a stranger. I’m guilty to the trend of “the bystander effect.” Residing in New York City, a place filled with a diverse amount of people, you’re bound to bump into someone in need of help. Whether it be helping a mother with her stroller or carrying the groceries of an elder, you’ll become either the bystander or the helper. As well, you can be the person in distress and receive help from someone after countless people ignore the …show more content…
As the helper, at Grand Ave train station, there was a woman who needed help with her stroller so I rushed to her aid. I carried the stroller from the entrance of the station to the underground level. After the train ride, as the woman got off the train, she helped an elderly woman with her groceries. In the article, it states “[R]eceiving help reliably increased the likelihood of being generous toward a strangers...were also less susceptible to the bystander effect[.]” Since I helped the woman with her stroller, it caused a chain of generosity and prevented her from observing the woman struggle with her groceries. Most likely she isn’t aware of the “bystander effect” but the actions of one person can be contagious to the receiver preventing you from being a part of the