Why can’t we just ask? The influence of research methods on results. The case of the “bystander effect”

Abstract

The article discusses the issue of the departure from examining real behaviours in a real environment, a trend in social psychology which has been observed going back several years, and the impact of this phenomenon for social psychology as a scientific discipline. The article presents two studies on the well-known and explored “bystander effect” (Darley, Latane, 1968). This phenomenon is examined in two ways – once by way of a “traditional” field experiment conducted in natural conditions, and once through a survey. As it turned out, the results generated by the two studies were diametrically opposite, and only in the field experiment were we able to achieve a pattern of results consistent with those in the original studies.