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Related Concept Videos

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The discussion of bullying highlights the problem of witnesses not intervening to help a victim. This is a common occurrence, as the following well-publicized event demonstrates. In 1964, in Queens, New York, a 19-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked by a person with a knife near the back entrance to her apartment building and again in the hallway inside her apartment building. When the attack occurred, she screamed for help numerous times and eventually died from her stab wounds.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 30, 2025

Measuring Neural and Behavioral Activity During Ongoing Computerized Social Interactions: An Examination of Event-Related Brain Potentials
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Prosocial priming and bystander effect in an online context.

Costanza Scaffidi Abbate1, Raffaella Misuraca2, Chiara Vaccaro1

  • 1Department of Psychology, Educational Science and Human Movement, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy.

Frontiers in Psychology
|August 29, 2022
PubMed
Summary

Priming prosociality reduced the bystander effect online. Even with many virtual bystanders, people helped when primed with prosocial behavior, demonstrating a key finding in social psychology.

Keywords:
bystander effecthelponlineprimingprosocial behavior

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Area of Science:

  • Social Psychology
  • Online Behavior

Background:

  • The bystander effect describes reduced helping when others are present.
  • Online environments present unique contexts for social psychological phenomena.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if priming prosociality can mitigate the bystander effect in an online setting.
  • To examine the interaction between the number of bystanders and prosocial priming.

Main Methods:

  • Participants received a help request email in a 2x2 design (Bystander presence: 0 vs. 14; Prosocial priming: present vs. absent).
  • Response rates to the email were measured as the primary outcome.

Main Results:

  • A significant bystander effect was observed, with fewer responses when many virtual bystanders were present.
  • Prosocial priming eliminated the bystander effect, increasing responsiveness even with numerous bystanders.
  • The presence of 14 virtual bystanders significantly reduced email responsiveness compared to zero bystanders.

Conclusions:

  • Prosocial priming can effectively counteract the bystander effect in online environments.
  • These findings highlight the malleability of social behavior through situational priming.
  • The study contributes to understanding bystander intervention in digital contexts.