Pluralistic Ignorance In The Bystander's Effect

Even though being a bystander to an accident is frowned upon. Pluralistic Ignorance plays a major role in the bystander’s effect because everyone handles situations differently and may not know how to deal with traumatic situations. ” The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation”. (Burkley, 2009) When someone sees a tragic even happening they may not understand how to stop it from happing or how to assist them because people react to events differently. Everyone who is a bystander is not acting in selfish intentions. For example it there is woman who is suffering a brutal beating from a man and there is a group of men around him no helping the woman in destress …show more content…
When someone decides to help most of the time they base their decision on how the victim is reacting to the trauma that they are dealing with while reading the definition of Pluralistic Ignorance as “Groups all have norms of attitude and behavior which are shared and which help form the identity of the group. Pluralistic ignorance occurs where the majority of individuals in a group assume that most of their others are different in some way, whilst the truth is that they are more similar than they realize. They thus will conform to supposed norms. When most people do this, the supposed norm becomes the norm. These situations typically occur when the norms are older than all members of the group or when one member or a small group is dominant and can force their attitudes on the rest of the group” (Allport, 1993). Pluralist behavior does not exemplify prosocial behavior because it actually shows the exact …show more content…
According to (Eisenberg, 2004) “As individuals mature, they understand more, are better able to grasp the consequences of their behavior, and learn to accept and act upon general principles of morality. Cultures vary in the extent to which they foster prosocial behavior. Traditional collectivist cultures tend to inculcate prosocial values more than cultures that emphasize competition and individual achievement” (Eisenberg, 2004). This proves that most individuals culture and experience plays a major role in determining decisions in the by standers effect. There are some social and cultural pressure and beliefs about self-helping behavior? How many times have we surfed the web and see violent attacks and people are standing around recording the instead of stopping them or helping the victim. We can make and observation and see that those people are mainly social thinkers and most of the time when they react it is exactly how the people around them will