In his book The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, Ervin Staub argues, “Bystanders, people who witness but are not directly affected by the actions of perpetrators, help shape our society by their reactions…. Bystanders can exert powerful influences. They can define the meaning of events and move others toward empathy or indifference. The can promote values and norms of caring by their passivity of participation in the system, they can affirm the perpetrators.” What Staub is trying to convey is that bystanders can influence society based on what they do, or in certain cases, what they do not do. By choosing neutrality, they are essentially helping the negative side and therefore are agreeing to the negative side’s ideals and actions. This is a valid claim and I affirm Staub’s beliefs because there is an abundance of research and evidence that promote Staub’s beliefs.
For example, in Israel Charny’s The Encyclopedia of Genocide, Charny claims, “ Both types of bystanders usually remain passive or in various ways support perpetrators.” This statement coming from a respected Israeli psychologist and genocide scholar directly supports Staud’s arguments and beliefs. Furthermore, as outlined in MIT’s article Active Bystanders, Looking out for one another “ Victims of crime may be more infuriated at bystanders who did nothing to stop it and essentially affirmed the perpetrator.” This article is implying that bystanders, who affirmed the perpetrators are essentially no better than the perpetrators themselves. These claims all link back and further strengthen Staub and his beliefs.
Furthermore, another compelling idea supporting Staub’s claim comes from The History of the Holocaust by Carell Evans, the Presi...
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... June 2013. United States Holocaust Memorial Council. 25 Mar. 2014 .
"History of the Holocaust - The Bystanders." History of the Holocaust - The Bystanders. 17 Mar. 2013. 2 .
Charny, Israel W. "Bystanders to Genocide." Encyclopedia of genocide. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999. 127.
"Be An Upstander." Be An Upstander. Holocaust Museum Houston. 2013 .
Marsh, Jason, and Dacher Keltner. "Greater Good." We Are All Bystanders. 2013. UC Berkeley-Department of Psychology. .
"Active Bystanders: Looking Out for One Another At MIT." Active Bystanders: Looking Out for One Another At MIT. 2011. MIT.edu. .
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Bruno Bottelheim, “Helpless Victims,” in The Holocaust Problems and perspectives of Interpretation, ed. Donald L. Niewyk (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. 54-59.
...gh a twisted, absurd, fictitious proposal to condemn their actions, and thus, hopes to "shock" those involved into social change.
It was stated that whether or not people help depends on a series of interconnected events and decisions. They must first notice what’s happening, understand that it is an emergency and accept personal responsibility. When this fails to happen that is called the bystander effect (Carpenter & Huffman, 2008, p. 422).
"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims. University of South Florida. Web. 19 May 2014.
Gottfried, Ted. Deniers of the Holocaust: who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Brookfield , Connecticut : Twenty-First Century Books, 2001. Print.
Greenfield, Daniel M. "Crime of Complicity in Genocide: How the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia Got It Wrong, and Why It Matters." The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 98.3 (2008): 921-24. HeinOnline. Web. 18 Apr. 2011.
First off I’ll start off by talking about the bystander effect and how it could influence people’s altruistic behavior. Bystander effect is the phenomenon that when someone is in the need of help from anyone around, people who are around that person will only watch due to a few reasons like diffusion of responsibility and symbolic interactionism.
Bystander effect refers to the instance in which there is an emergency and people witnessing don’t respond when there are others around witnessing the same event. This happens because of pluralistic ignorance which is when people assume that there is nothing wrong because others surrounding them don’t look concerned. Two researchers, Latan and Darley, conducted an experiment to further study the bystander effect. In this experiment, Latan and Darley took multiple college students and one at a time, put them into cubicles. In a cubicle next to them there would be a recording device producing noises emulating distress noises in the form of choking. Eighty five percent of the students went to help; this is not an alarming number. The surprising
Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Print.
Also, social psychologists have long been concerned in when and why some individuals help others while some decline to help. Although the evidence for the inhibitory effect confounding, there are also counter-examples which exemplifies individuals demonstrating pro-social behavior in the presence of others. Hence, while the bystander effect can have a negative impact on prosocial behavior, altruism and heroism, researchers have identified factors that can help people overcome this predisposition and increase the probability that they will engage in helping act. Lantane and Darley (1968) proposed a five-step psychological process model to account for the bystander effect. These processes include observing that a critical situation is current, interpret the circumstance as a crisis, generate a feeling of individual obligation, believe that we have the adequate skills necessary to succeed, and finally reaching a conscious decision to render help (hellen et al )
Gottfried, Ted, and Stephen Alcorn. Deniers of the Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century, 2001. Print.
During World War II, six million Jews were brutally massacred by Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime. Several authors have written about the actions of bystanders in the Holocaust. In a poem, "The Hangman," and an allegory, The Terrible Things, Maurice Odgen and Eve Bunting described how bystanders could cause problems through their inactions.
The bystander effect plays a key role in society today. More and more people ignore a person in distress.
On December 3, in full view of a number of witnesses standing within close proximity, Ki-Suck Han, a 58 year-old male entered into an altercation with Naeem Davis, a 30 year-old homeless male at the Times Square subway station. Han was pushed down into the tracks and then struggled and pleaded for help for what was reported to be a full 22 seconds, as witnesses watched, took pictures, and failed to come to his assistance (Petrecca & Eversley, 2012). The man was then hit by the approaching subway train as it dragged into the station. This is a sad example of the Bystander Effect which demonstrates that people are less likely to come to the assistance of another in an emergency situation when other bystanders are present and also perceived to be responsible and able to help (Schneider, Gruman, and Coutts, 2012). Moreover, we are most of the time influenced by Social Loafing. Social loafing is the diffusion of responsibility among a group of people. When a group of people are perceiving an emergency situation, all of them tend to think that others are available to help. Social influence explains that people always look to others to evaluate a situation as a real emergency. We assume that others may know something that we do not know and we measure their reactions before we decide how we will respond. If we noticed that those around us are acting as if it is an emergency, then we will view the situation in the same way and act accordingly. However, if those around us are acting calm, then we may not realize the immediacy of the situation and therefore fail to respond appropriately. Maybe this is the answer to why people did not help the homeless who was attacked by the 58 year- old man. They failed to see the situation as a real emergency, and as a result they did not act