People help each other less
often and less quickly when bystanders are present. In this paper, we propose
that alcohol consumption could attenuate or reverse this so-called bystander
effect. Alcohol impairs people cognitively and perceptually, leading them to
think less about the presence of others and behave less inhibited. Moreover,
alcohol makes people more prone to see the benefits of helping and not the
costs.
To provide an initial test of these lines of reasoning, we invited
visitors of bars in Amsterdam to join our study at a secluded spot at the bar.
We manipulated bystander presence, and at the end of the study, we measured
alcohol consumption. When participants took their seats, the experimenter
dropped some items. We measured how many items were picked up and how quickly
participants engaged in helping.
Results revealed that alcohol did not
influence the bystander effect in terms of the amount of help given. But
importantly, it did influence the bystander effect in terms of response times:
people who consumed alcohol actually came to aid faster in the presence of others.
…The foremost finding from
the current contribution is that alcohol does not simply attenuate the entire
bystander effect, but only increases response speeds. This
could imply that the influences that seriously undermine helping and
intervention (such as audience inhibition, confusion and diffusion of
responsibility, and pluralistic ignorance) may slow down the decision process
but do not actually change it. Indeed, people under the influence of alcohol in
the presence of others were at least as fast as sober people who were alone. It
seems that the complications caused by the presence of bystanders in the
five-step model (Latané and Darley, 1970) may simply be ignored by them. Under the
influence of alcohol, people may not notice that no-one is helping and thus do
not experience pluralistic ignorance before step 2. They may not think that
someone else will provide help and thus may not experience diffusion of
responsibility before step 3, and they may not worry about how to implement the
help in step 4. Because the amount of help given remains the same, it may imply
that people make their decision to act rather quickly based on the immediate
situation, and then contemplate and search (in each step) for information that
confirms the correctness of the decision. As drunk people are often cognitively
impaired, they may be less likely to go through this process of “false
deliberation” (see also Waroquier et al., 2010)…
1Department of Experimental and Applied
Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime
and Law Enforcement, Amsterdam, Netherlands
3Department Psychology of Conflict, Risk,
and Safety, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Edited by: Jacob B.
Hirsh, University of Toronto, Canada
Reviewed by: Andrew K.
Littlefield, Texas Tech University, USA; Ronald Friedman, University at Albany,
SUNY, USA
Corresponding
author.