Researchers Found the ‘Bystander Effect’ in 5-Year-Olds

New York Magazine:

The 1964 stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in New York City went a long way toward kicking off social psychologists’ interest in the subject: In the story’s initial reporting and subsequent retellings, numerous bystanders heard Genovese’s cries for help but failed to intervene. (This, as The New Yorker pointed out last year, isn’t quite how things actually went down, but the effect has been observed in many other contexts as well.)

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But as a team led by Maria Plötner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology writes in a new article in Psychological Science, we don’t know much about how and when the bystander effect emerges in children. There’s only been a little bit of past research into this, the authors write, and those studies that have been done haven’t been structured in a way that reveals all that much about what might be driving the bystander effect — or the lack of it — in children.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine