The bystander effect and social control behavior: the effect of the presence of others on people's reactions to norm violations

Abstract

Observers of deviant social behavior sometimes communicate disapproval directly or indirectly to the perpetrator of a deviant act. This reaction has been termed 'social control'. Three field studies were conducted to explore the influence of the number of bystander-observers on the likelihood of social control. We predicted that the presence of others would inhibit people's tendency to communicate their disapproval to the deviant but only if personal implication was low. In the first study, we measured participants' perceptions of two fictive situations, one in which a deviant draws graffiti in an elevator of a shopping center and one in which a deviant litters in a small neighborhood park by throwing a plastic bottle in the bushes. As expected, participants considered both behaviors to be equally counternormative but felt personally more implicated by the littering behavior in the park. In Studies 2 and 3, the two situations were enacted with confederates of the experimenter. Naïve bystanders served as participants, and social control was the primary dependent variable. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found evidence for a bystander effect in the low personal implication situation ('graffiti in the elevator') but not in the high personal implication situation ('littering in park'). These results make clear that perceived personal implication moderates the extent to which people are inhibited by the presence of others when they decide whether they should exert social control or not.

Group membership influences social control of perpetrators of uncivil behaviors

“…First, the predicted behavior assessed in our study is completely consistent with the findings of Chekroun and Brauer (2002) who showed that approximatively 68% of their participants predicted that they would react toward an individual who litters in a neighborhood park. More importantly, Brauer, 2002) reported a very strong correlation between the self-reports and actual social control reaction in the same situations, including a littering situation (.84). We are thus comfortable with the assumption that self-reports of social control intentions are reasonable indicators of social control behavior.…”

“…After reading the situation, participants were asked to indicate how they would react. They responded on a seven-point scale adapted from Chekroun and Brauer (2002): 0 ¼ no reaction, 1 ¼ indifferent, you look away, 2 ¼ loud audible sigh, 3 ¼ make a polite comment to the person about the incorrectness of her behavior, 4 ¼ ask the person if she would pick up her bottle, 5 ¼ command in authoritarian tone the person to pick up her bottle, and 6 ¼ make a personal insult in aggressive tone to the person. The two first responses are considered to be the expression of ignorance or absence of awareness of the deviant behavior and thus express the absence of intention to react toward the deviant behavior.…”

“…There was no difference within the social controllers with respect to kind of social control depending on group-membership, x 2 (N ¼ 69, 4) ¼ 3.02, p > .50. Thus, as in previous work (e.g., Brauer & Chekroun, 2005;Chekroun & Brauer, 2002), we collapsed the scale such that participants received a 0 if they did not anticipate an act of social control, and a 1 if they did.…”

A Routine Activity Approach: Assessing Victimization by Gender in Transit Environments and Other Public Locations

“…The bystander effect and a desire for anonymity by citizens may also contribute to the victimization of suitable targets in public spaces (Chekroun & Brauer, 2002). Fear of crime in these settings can influence the routine activities of people as well (Ceccato, 2016;Ceccato, 2014;Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014;Madan & Nalla, 2016;Wiebe, et al, 2014).…”

Moral action as cheater suppression in human super organisms: Testing the human superorganism approach to morality

“…[12,82] Just visualizing a crowd makes you less likely to help/intervene. It is therefore difficult to explain the result here except as a response to experienced pressures to regulate social life at large scale.…”