John M. Darley

John M. Darley (born April 3, 1938 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † August 31, 2018 in Lawrenceville , New Jersey ) was an American social psychologist and professor at Princeton University . He mainly dealt with questions of human assistance and tried to find rules here.

Life

Darley studied from 1956 to 1960 at Swarthmore College , where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1960. He later went to Harvard University , where he received a Masters (1962) and Ph.D. (1965) acquired. Daniel Batson can be counted to one of the most important Ph.D. students of Darley .

In 2005 Darley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

research

Darley was best known for his work with Bibb Latané . They investigated the bystander effect , i.e. the question of why people do not always intervene when help is needed in the event of an accident or other incident. The background to this was the murder of Kitty Genovese , who was murdered in New York in March 1964, while 38 people watched inactive.

Darley found out through experiments that more people at the scene can lead to less helpfulness. He attributed this to two causes. On the one hand, people would get the impression that because nobody was helping, everything was correct ( pluralistic ignorance ) and, on the other hand, it would become unclear in groups who is responsible ( diffusion of responsibility ), which also means the willingness to act in the event of an accident or another incident help reduce.

According to Latané and Darley (1970), help is only given if

1. the person notices the situation
2. interpreted it as an emergency
3. feels responsible
4. knows how to help
5. the “costs” of helping (e.g. danger to one's own health, time required, etc.) are not too high.

If all five conditions are not met, no assistance will be provided.

swell

• Philip Zimbardo , Richard J. Gerrig: Psychology. Springer, ISBN 978-3-540-20011-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary , accessed September 20, 2018