Bystander effect

The bystander effect or Genovese syndrome is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases where individuals do not offer any means of help in an emergency situation to the victim when other people are present. The probability of help has in the past been thought to be inversely related to the number of bystanders; in other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. The mere presence of other bystanders greatly decreases intervention. This happens because as the number of bystanders increases, any given bystander is less likely to notice the incident, less likely to interpret the incident as a problem, and less likely to assume responsibility for taking action.

The Bystander Effect  can be very useful as a part of Social Engineering.

This effect will not happen every single time as there are good people in this world that are willing to help those in distress. As you already probably know, there are good people that simply love to help everybody and they will never let themselves look bad things happening in front of their eyes.

    Most psychologists say this is because people are lazy, other psychologists say that its because no one else sees the distressed person as a priority, so it must not be that big of a deal. Others, say that they simply avoid the distressed person because they think the person could be pulling a con.

Anyway, people may also feel fear of the situation. For example, what if somebody carries a knife or any weapon? What will happen to me if I help?... Generally, some parents are learning their children that they should stay out of trouble, for example if they see two or more people fighting, arguing… just step away! This can also be possible reason. Or one more possible reason, do you really think that you are so important to some strangers that he will jump and sometimes probably risk their lives to save you?


     Someone gets pick-pocketed. They start to fuss, they make a big commotion, and they tell people to stop the pickpocket. Now lets say that you had a group of people just walk by the distressed person completely ignoring him. There is a high chance that everyone else around the distressed person would do absolutely nothing simply because no one else was doing anything.

There are few examples from my real life that I will write here.

One:

On my college female fights are rarely happened, but arguments do very often. And in one of the arguments, one of my friends took place because she was jealous of the cutest girl in the college. My friend is psychologically very dangerous person because she profiles people in a free time and she made the psychological profile of the cutest girl on college before that argument. She knew her vulnerabilities. She wanted to humiliate her.

Once they started argument, cuter girl was trying to insult her through physical look, something like I am better chick, my tits are better, you cannot be seen once my hot body is here… But there was a problem: my friend had psychological profile and knew everything. So after five minutes she started talking about weak spots, personal stuff, family stuff… you know what am I talking about, I really wouldn’t like to write all that list of insults. My friend started talking that she knows why her opponent’s mother has fucker besides her father and so on, and something like she knows that her will never be able to hold on a day without a boyfriend and huge, muscular dick in her mouth because she is copies mother’s behaviour. And so many other insults.

After ten minutes cute girl started to cry, and my friend didn’t stop. More and more personal stuff were released in public. Nobody told anything, and 50 people looked that argument.

After 20 minutes, cute girl threatens that she will beat her to death. One problem: my friend is a kung-fu master and K1 fighter, and she just places her face in front of the cute girl and just repeating:”Common you little busty whore, punch me, I am barely waiting!” You notice that nobody talks(nobody even moved) but two of them.

After 30 minutes cute girl is trying to punch my friend, but her skills were to weak, my friend kicked her few times to the left thigh and she couldn’t walk normally anymore. Argument ended and my friend was just laughing and told her:” You can be the cutest girl in the whole world, but arguing with me is a verbal murder.”, and just walked away.

Why am I writing this? The cutest girl was raising noise, asking for help, yelling, crying and so on… nobody even tried to help her, though she slept with few guys from my college and they were present at the moment. Was this just fear or bystander effect? I would definitively say bystander effect. 50 people were present, and nobody did anything. I love my friend a lot, and I supported her, but i don’t think that she should go that far.

Two:

Every day in a bus I see grannys looking for a place to sit. Granny wanted to sit, but muscular guy with tattoos didn’t wanted to get up. Granny started to yell, curse and scream; but he was just laughing.

Nobody said even a word.

Three:

A guy robbed a grocery store. He was running away with the stolen goods and he passed beside the group of 20 people. The seller was chasing him and yelling:”Thief, thief, help me, call the police!” When he asked the cell phone from them to call the police, they just told him to stay away cause they don’t like to be interrupted in listening their favourite song. And he was running through the main street, nobody even moved.

So hope this is clearer to you now. If you have questions, feel free to ask them.