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Category: Project

Description: The purposes of this research are to replicate the bystander effect and to investigate whether priming the concept of “responsibility” will reduce it. The bystander effect is a well-established phenomenon, which describes the tendency to engage in less helping behavior in the presence of others (Fischer et al., 2011). One reason the bystander effect occurs is because of a diffusion of responsibility among potential helpers. This widely-cited explanation for the bystander effect asserts that as the number of potential helpers increase, the feeling of personal responsibility decreases for any particular bystander, which reduces helping. We will attempt to replicate and extend the bystander effect in a naturalistic setting using a pen-dropping scenario and a responsibility prime.