Output details

Bystander Responses to a Violent Incident in an Immersive Virtual Environment

Originality: The bystander effect is a well-studied psychological phenomenon; the more bystanders present, the less likely that any of them will intervene during an incident. Studying models of bystander behaviour in violent scenarios has proven extremely difficult for both ethical and practical reasons. In this work we evaluated the phenomenon with participants immersed in a virtual reality (VR) environment populated with life-sized animated virtual humans. This platform has enabled us to evaluate intervention scenarios in violent emergencies in an ethically sound and safe fashion. We are the first to study the influence of social identity on the likelihood of bystander intervention in an immersive VR environment.

Significance: This work, funded by the EPSRC (£290,000, Zhang), validates the use of VR in experimental psychology. In addition, this paper proposes the use of symbolic regression as a behavioural modelling technique, which is novel in the context of psychological research. This research also provides a practical exemplar of how computer animation can be applied to tackle real-world problems of wide-reaching significance. It has been featured in the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Walk on By” by Nick Ross and the BBC article “Fight or flight - would you 'have a go'?” in 2010.

Rigour: Our results are based on a sample of 40 subjects and data collected include video footage, along with interviews and questionnaires which provided both quantitative and qualitative information. The relationship between this data was rigorously evaluated using established statistical techniques relevant to psychology.