HW 7 Essay example

Submitted By holliiipop
Words: 813
Pages: 4

Homework 7

1. Informational social influence contributes to the occurrence of the bystander effect because we look to the vast amount of people who are all choosing not to help in the emergency situation and think that their choice of actions is better and more accurate than our own; thus, we will also choose not to help. Normative social influence contributes to the occurence of the bystander effect out of the fear that we will be doing something everyone else is not doing or does not approve of. So, if the people around us are not addressing the emergency, their behavior and actions will influence us to behave and act the same way out of fear of being rejected or drawing attention to ourself.

2. I recently had an experience with the bystander effect. When I was working the other day at a farmer’s market, I saw a special needs child in a wheelchair who was given a popsicle to keep her preoccupied while her mother finished shopping at one of the booths. Her mother had slid the wrapper about halfway down, which the child decided she did not like. While attempting to take the popsicle out completely out of the wrapper, she accidentally dropped it on the ground. I know this isn't an emergency situation to us, but it was an emergency according to the little girl. A few people walked by ignoring the situation and trying not to stare.The popsicle guy uses our peaches to make some of his popsicles and usually gives me one for free so, I grabbed a popsicle, opened it up ( yes, I completely took the wrapper off this time), and gave it to the little girl. I wasn't influenced by the conformity processes only because I adore special needs children and they are who I want to work with when I graduate. However, I think that most did not address the situation because sometimes people do not know how to interact with a special needs child.

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4. We are more likely to help those who are members of our social category because of the In-group bias theory. In-group bias occurs when we treat the people who we have defined as part of our group better than others who we consider to be in the out-group. This theory is mainly caused by self-esteem. Individuals want to enhance their self-esteem by interacting with their group, but only if they see their group as superior to other groups.

5. This finding is consistent with the Urban Overload effect because only the effects that required direct contact were statistically significant, whereas the effects with no interaction were not. This is because the effects that required direct contact had a negative correlation closer to 1.0, which indicates a strong relationship between an increase in population size and density, and a decrease in helping. While on the other hand, the effects that did not require contact and were not significant had a negative correlation that is closer to 0. This means that whether people helped or not did not depend on the population size or density. Therefore, the findings are consistent with the Urban Overload Effect.

6. This is consistent