Page "Bystander effect" Paragraph 19

These, and many other findings, which suggest that helping behaviour in general, and specifically bystander intervention is more likely in the context of shared group membership can be explained in terms of self-categorization and empathy.

From the perspective of self-categorization theory, a person ’ s own social identity, well-being is tied to their group membership so that when a group based identity is salient, the suffering of one group member can be considered to directly affect another group member.

This shared identity, referred to as self-other merging, is able to form the basis of empathy, which has been found to predict helping behaviour.

For example, in a study relating to helping after eviction where both empathy, social identification and helping behaviour were measured, both social identification and empathy were found to predict helping, however, when social identification was controlled, empathy no longer predicted helping behaviour.