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When an individual has to make the decision to intervene in a given situation, the presence of others generally inhibits his or her reaction. In social psychology, this phenomenon is refered to as the bystander effect. The field study presented in this article examines the bystander effect in the realm of social control behavior. A confederate of the experimenter threw a plastic bottle in the forest while a varying number of hikers passed him. Personal implication was manipulated by the presence or absence of a second confederate who seemed to be the first confederate's friend. A first study has shown that personal implication is high when people face a single individual who litters in a recreational area. However, when that individual is accompanied by a friend, the task to communicate to the first individual that his behavior is socially unacceptable falls upon the friend, and personal implication is low. The results of the present study yield a bystander effect, but only when personal implication is low. When personal implication is high, a constant proportion of hikers intervened, and this proportion did not depend on the number of bystanders. This research shows that the inhibiting effect of the presence of others in the realm of social control behavior can be eliminated when people feel personally implicated by the counter-normative behavior.
