Priming Effects on Commitment to Help and on Real Helping Behavior

Abstract

Years of research on bystander apathy have demonstrated that the physical presence of others can reduce the tendency to help individuals needing assistance. Recent research on the implicit bystander effect has suggested that simply imagining the presence of others can lead to less helping behavior on a subsequent unrelated task. The present study was designed to contribute to previous findings on the implicit bystander effect by demonstrating these effects on commitment to help and on real helping behavior, rather than simply on intentions to help. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrate that merely priming participants with the construct of being in a group at Time 1 created significantly less commitment to future helping on a subsequent task at Time 2. Study 2 aimed to extend this effect to behavioral measures and verified that participants exposed to a group prime helped less than those who were exposed to a single-person prime. The implications of these findings for the literature on the bystander effect are discussed.

Notes

¹Garcia et al.'s (2002) measure of helping behavior was the willingness to contribute an annual donation (Studies 1 and 2) and to agree to participate in a second experiment (Study 3). Nelson and Norton (2005) operationalized helping by asking participants to evaluate their behaviors in some hypothetical situations (Studies 1a and 1b) and by asking them to participate in a second experiment (Study 2). Pichon et al. (2007) tested the impact of subliminal priming of religious concepts essentially on prosocial behavioral intentions; their measure was “how many pamphlets participants had taken in order to distribute them” but the authors did not actually measure if participants really would have distributed all the pamphlets. One of the exceptions is the research by Macrae and Johnston (1998) that used a measure of real helping behavior, recording how many leaking pens participants picked up.

²Fischer et al. (2006) pointed out that only a small amount of research on the bystander effect has confronted subjects with an emergency caused by a violent crime with potentially unsafe consequences for the bystander and the victim. In most cases, the problem of the victim was generally viewed as an impersonally caused accident (e.g., falling bookcases, Latané & Rodin, 1969; theft of books, Howard & Crano, 1974), as a physical illness (e.g., nervous seizures, Darley & Latané, 1968), or in the virtual world (Blair, Foster Thompson, & Wuensch, 2005). Further, Fischer et al.'s (2011) meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous emergencies revealed that the effect is moderate when the emergency is a dangerous one.

³No case limit occurred; that is, noparticipants entered an exceptionally large number of questionnaires.

⁴For example, Pardini and Katzev (1983) found that strong commitments, where subjects signed a statement saying their household would participate in a project on newspaper recycling, appeared to be more effective than minimal commitments, where subjects were asked to make a verbal commitment to recycle. The results indicated that the stronger the commitment, the greater the degree of recycling.