Educating My Class About the Bystander Effect

For my first two posts, I discussed my past experience of being a victim of the bystander effect, and wanting to explore more about it. I learnt a lot of surprising information about why a person would not help defuse the situation and what makes a person a bystander. I learned that there are three main factors for a bystander effect to happen. The first is the amount of people around the situation. The more people around the situation, the least likely they would intervene. Second, is the idea of diffusion of responsibility. This relates to the second one where people will less likely take responsibility for helping out when there are others present. They think other people are responsible take action. Finally, the dominant person in the group can also play a huge role in the bystander effect. The so called “leader” of the group can choose to respond or not which can cause a chain reaction to his/her followers to also follow the leaders decision. I also learned about past experiments that is similar to the topic about the bystander effect like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment.  The Milgram Experiment focus on the obedience of a authority figure and personal conscience of the non-authority figure. This is similar to one of the factors of the bystander effect which is the dominant person. The Stanford Prison Experiment wanted to see the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The results of the experiment were surprising because the situation caused the volunteers  to behave a certain way.

What I decided to do to spread awareness about the bystander effect to other people was to educate my English class about the bystander effect by making my very own presentation about bystanders. In my presentation, I started out with a question to the whole group asking if they knew what the bystander effect was. Only half of the class raise their hand to share their answer.  Then I started to tell them what the factors and causes are of the bystander effect. Then, I started to educate them about what they could do to overcome the bystander effect.

I recently started to research how everyday people can help overcome and how to avoid the bystander effect from happening. According to VeryWellMind, there are 7 ways that could help you overcome the Bystander Effect. They said that just looking at other people helping another person out can help inspire you to do the same. Being aware of what’s going on is important too because you have to know when someone is actually in need of help or if they are just playing around. Having a personal connection with someone from the crowd can help too. Just by looking them in the eye or talking to them can increase the chance of them helping you. You also need to see everyone as person who will need of help then excluding a certain type of people out. Finally, the way that is the most important one to overcome the Bystander Effect is to just jump and help. You might have everything planned out and know what is going on, but still be just standing there, just watching the events happen. The most important part is actually helping and taking action so just jump in and help.

After doing this project for two quarters, I learned a lot about the bystander effect. I went from having slight knowledge about it to having a deeper understanding. I feel like I helped contribute to something good and that I have done something for the community. What I feel like I could have done better is to not have been so nervous when presenting in front of people and also I wish I had practiced presenting. What is still left for me to do to make a change is spread the word out to even more people than just my class   

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