Bystander Effect - Social Psychology Research - The Role of Group Membership

The Role of Group Membership

Based on general altruism research which suggests that helping behaviour is more likely where there is similarity between the helper and the person being helped, recent research has considered the role of similarity, and more specifically, shared group membership, in encouraging bystander intervention. In a 2005 experiment, researchers found that passers-by were more likely to help an apparently injured person if that person was wearing a football jersey which supported the same team as them than an opposing team. However, when their shared identity as football fans was made salient instead, supporters of both teams were likely to be helped, significantly more so than a person wearing a plain shirt.

In 2008 a study by Mark Levine and Simon Crowther found that increasing group size inhibited intervention in a street violence scenario when bystanders were strangers but encouraged intervention when bystanders were friends. They also found that when gender identity is salient group size encouraged intervention when bystanders and victim shared social category membership. In addition, group size interacted with context-specific norms that both inhibit and encourage helping. The bystander effect is not a generic consequence of increasing group size. When bystanders share group-level psychological relationships, group size can encourage as well as inhibit helping.

These, and many other findings, which suggest that helping behaviour in general, and specifically bystander intervention is more likely in the context of shared group membership can be explained in terms of self-categorization and empathy. From the perspective of self-categorization theory, a person’s own social identity, well-being is tied to their group membership so that when a group based identity is salient, the suffering of one group member can be considered to directly affect another group member. This shared identity, referred to as self-other merging, is able to form the basis of empathy, which has been found to predict helping behaviour. For example, in a study relating to helping after eviction where both empathy, social identification and helping behaviour were measured, both social identification and empathy were found to predict helping, however, when social identification was controlled, empathy no longer predicted helping behaviour.