Guilt and the Bystander Effect in the Computer lab

Brian Jackey and Robert Fulk

Seminar Final paper with Presentation

We all feel guilt. Every day guilt is a part of our lives. But what causes guilt? Is it biological, is there a hormone in our body that causes guilt? Or is it psychological, a product of our mind? In this project we sought to study guilt, and performed a small study to give support to our theory that guilt is psychologically driven.

For our study we went to the computer lab at our college. There are a limited number of terminals there, and most of the time students can be found waiting for a terminal to free up. One day in the computer lab, waiting for a computer I noticed something. A few people where playing games on their computers, not doing schoolwork, oblivious that their recreation was infringing on the people waiting who needed computers to do school work. This is curious because on the wall of the lab is a sign that says: "If you are using a computer for recreation purposes, please be courteous of other students waiting to work on their school work."

Our study is centered on why the people playing games in the lab did not get up. We noticed the more they were playing games, the more they were answering email that did not have anything to do with schoolwork, the longer they made people wait. How does this factor in with guilt? The more people that where around, the more the people playing games would make people wait.

We noticed they felt guilty when there were fewer people around, but when more people where present, they did not seem to care at all. We surmise that they felt less guilty because the more people around, the less blame would be put upon them. This is called the bystander effect. The bystander effect, coined by psychologists is a theory that says the more people around, the less likely someone will act. For example, at the scene of an accident, the more people present, the less likely one person will come from the crowd and help. The fewer people present, the more likely one person will step up and help. An example study for the bystander effect is the Latane & Darley study performed in 1968. One of the most famous experiments to look at the bystander effect. Undergraduate men from Columbia University were asked to fill out a questionnaire in a small room that had a one-way mirror for observation purposes. After a few moments, smoke was poured into the room through a small vent in the wall. The experiment had three conditions that differed by the number and type of people who were in the room. In the first condition, a single subject was placed in the room. In the second condition, one subject was in the room along with two "passive" confederates who did not react to the smoke. Finally, in the last condition, a group three men were placed in the room, all of whom were true subjects.

The first result that Latane and Darley examined was the amount of time it took subjects in all three conditions to notice the smoke after it started pouring from the vent in the wall. The subjects in the first condition, who were alone in the room, were more likely to look around the room as they did their work. Therefore, it took these subjects less than 5 seconds to notice the smoke. By contrast, the subjects in the two group conditions stayed more focused on their own paper and did not look around the room as much, therefore taking nearly 20 seconds to detect the smoke. Therefore, as the number of people/bystanders increases, the less likely it is that any single person will notice an event or react to it.

We believe the incidents in the computer lab is part of the bystander effect. People playing games in the lab did not notice the people waiting because they were too busy focusing on themselves. In a smaller situation, with less people present, the people playing games would have noticed the people waiting and therefore would have gotten up and relinquished the terminal.

We did a study of this, coming in on four different occasions to witness and record. We found that our hypothesis was true, and that people do not get off the computers if they are playing games and other’s around them are doing the same. We found that the wait was substantially longer if people had other’s around them playing games. We found the wait to be much less if the people playing games where few and far between.

Our conclusion is that because of the bystander effect and the guilt factor, people would not get off the computers when other’s around them were wasting time as well. The reason for this is that they felt more secure, and felt less guilt because they had other’s doing what they were doing. In a given situation where they did not have the same people around them, guilt kicked in and they got up.