Priming Effects on Commitment to Help and on RealHelping Behavior

Years of research on bystander apathy have demonstrated that the physical presence ofothers can reduce the tendency to help individuals needing assistance. Recent researchon the implicit bystander effect has suggested that simply imagining the presence ofothers can lead to less helping behavior on a subsequent unrelated task. The presentstudy was designed to contribute to previous findings on the implicit bystander effectby 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 merelypriming participants with the construct of being in a group at Time 1 created significantlyless commitment to future helping on a subsequent task at Time 2. Study 2 aimedto extend this effect to behavioral measures and verified that participants exposed to agroup prime helped less than those who were exposed to a single-person prime. Theimplications of these findings for the literature on the bystander effect are discussed.