Psychology of a Crowd: What Contributed to the Gang Rape of a 15-Year-Old Girl?
Many are still shocked over the gang rape of the 15-year-old girl at a Homecoming dance, though the act itself is not the worst part necessarily. It’s the fact that as many as 20 bystanders or participants were present and either didn’t do anything to stop the act or participated as a “mob.”
A few media outlets have attributed this to the “bystander effect,” “pluralistic ignorance,” “herd behavior” and “mob behavior,” “mob effect” or “mob mentality.” An article in the Monterey County Herald specifically talks about the psychological reasoning behind the monstrous incident.
According to a social psychology textbook, the bystander effect is “the tendency of a bystander to be less likely to help in an emergency if there are other onlookers present.” This bystander effect could lead to diffusion of responsibility, where each person thinks another person in the crowd is helping with the situation. Another phenomenon that can happen from the bystander effect is pluralistic ignorance, which is “the mistaken impression on the part of group members that, because no one else is acting concerned, there is no cause for alarm.”
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