Matching Behavior in Bystander effect
Bystander intervention is a famous psychological term that demonstrates people’s behavior of helping in emergencies. Contrary to people’s common sense that it is easier to get help as more people are around, this term witnesses that the responsibility that people feel is inversely proportional to the number of people present in emergencies. This particular behavior, known as diffusion of responsibility, sparked the interest of psychologists when the famous Genovese tragedy occurred; an incident that Kitty Genovese, a woman in New York City, was brutally murdered by a man with a knife in her neighborhood. Inspired by this abnormal phenomenon, John Darley and Bibb Latane designed and executed an experiment to examine the reason of people’s behavior in emergencies
In class, we have discussed about the exchange network and matching in social network. In exchange network, fixed amount of money is placed on each edge of a graph and each node is limited to exchange with only one of her neighbors. Then, each node negotiates with neighbor nodes to determine how they are going to split the money. Usually, node with more power, proportional to degree of freedom of that node, gets more payoff than node with less power. However, situation can be reversed when less powerful node bargain with only one edged node. We can apply exchange network theorem to observe the behavior of nodes. Consider the figure below
In this graph, five edges are connected to node A, which at first makes node A the most powerful node in this network. However, if we look closely, node A does not have much power to choose its matching node. For nodes other than A, it is reasonable for them to take one of smaller nodes because it guarantees better outcome. Similar to this observable situation, we can presume that people do not tend to take personal responsibility to help a victim when there are many other people who are also available to help, thinking that even though they do not take responsibility, someone else might take it.
http://www.edmondschools.net/Portals/3/docs/Terri_McGill/READ-Bystander%20effect.pdf