Psychology professor corrects miscalculation
Released: May 1, 2008
Safety in numbers. Everyone knows the saying and has believed it to be true. In 1964 however, it was proven wrong when the murder of a NY City woman, Kitty Genovese was witnessed by 38 people and no one called the police.
Fast forward 17 years to 1981 when social scientists Bibb Latané and Steve Nida found in their landmark article, "Ten Years of Research on Group Size and Helping," that in fact there was not more safety in numbers based on research conducted after the Genovese murder. Their article is one of the most replicated and respected articles in social psychology.
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Assistant Professor of Psychology Dan Stadler recently found an error in Latané and Nida’s monumental findings. He corrected the miscalculation that found that under restricted communication, when bystanders can see or hear the victim but not each other, victims were significantly more likely to receive help from a group than from an individual.
Stadler wrote an article correcting the miscalculation. "Revisiting the issue of safety in numbers: The likelihood of receiving help from a group" appears in "Social Influence," a journal that provides an integrated focus for research into the psychology field, in the March 2008 issue and it will again open the question for debate as to if there really is safety in numbers.
"It was an accident really," Stadler said. He was questioning a formula for unrelated research he was conducting and came across the mistake supporting Latané and Nida’s findings that the more bystanders, the less a person is safe or the less chance that someone will call for help. The miscalculation was essentially a miscomputed average. The authors added up 24 scores but divided by 23, not 24.
Stadler points to three reasons why bystanders do not react in situations. The first is diffusion of responsibility, thinking that because there are so many people present, someone else will act and that person does not need to. Second is the concept of a person’s social influence which is how seeing a person not react to a situation will influence others not to react. Third is audience inhibition or the personal fear of embarrassment.
He relates the two ideas of social inhibition, what causes humans to act when they see someone in need of help and the concept of safety in numbers. "Imagine the scale of justice," Stadler said. "On one side is social inhibition and how humans feel a need to react during a dangerous situation. On the other side is the idea of safety in numbers. The scale is going to constantly fluctuate."
Using secondary research conducted for the original 1981 article, Stadler has written his article on the inhibiting effect of groups on helping behavior and highlights the distinction between social inhibition and a victim's likelihood of receiving help. "It is important to understand that the Latané and Nida article had two conclusions, one has been found to be incorrect and the other remains unchanged," Stadler said.
- Laura Plamann,plamannle06@uww.edu
