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”. 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.