Many colleges utilize bystander intervention programs to address gender-based violence. The goal of these programs is to help students overcome barriers to intervention, including evaluation inhibition, which occurs when bystanders expect to be viewed negatively for intervening. We have limited information, though, on how college students evaluate bystanders who intervene. Specifically, we do not know whether evaluations of bystanders who engage in different levels of intervention vary across situations or how men and women who intervene similarly are evaluated. Without this information, it is difficult to design prevention programs that help bystanders overcome evaluation inhibition. To gather this information, we conducted a vignette experiment with college student participants ( n = 82). We specifically examined how students evaluated the reasonableness of male and female bystanders who engaged in different behaviors (direct intervention and threatening to tell an authority, direct intervention only, indirect intervention, doing nothing) across four situations (assault at a party, workplace harassment, harassment by a teaching assistant, and intimate partner violence). Analyses of variance found that there was situational variability in how the bystander is evaluated for different intervention tactics, though bystanders who did nothing were always evaluated the most negatively. Bystander’s gender, however, did not affect evaluations, suggesting that intervention expectations for men and women are similar. These results indicate that while there is an underlying norm supportive of intervention behavior, situational characteristics influence whether college students think it is reasonable to call authorities, confront the perpetrator, or engage in indirect intervention. The central implication of this study is that bystander intervention training should provide opportunities for students to practice intervention behaviors across a wide variety of situations of gender-based violence in order build up their store of intervention tactics, thus increasing their ability to overcome evaluation inhibition.

中文翻译：

---

人们会怎么想？大学生如何评价旁观者干预行为


许多大学利用旁观者干预计划来解决性别暴力问题。这些项目的目标是帮助学生克服干预障碍，包括评价抑制，当旁观者期望因干预而受到负面看待时，就会出现评价抑制。然而，关于大学生如何评价干预的旁观者，我们的信息有限。具体来说，我们不知道参与不同干预水平的旁观者的评估是否因情况而异，也不知道如何评估进行类似干预的男性和女性。如果没有这些信息，就很难设计出帮助旁观者克服评估抑制的预防计划。为了收集这些信息，我们对大学生参与者 (n = 82) 进行了一项小插曲实验。我们专门研究了学生如何评估男性和女性旁观者在四种情况（聚会上的袭击、工作场所骚扰、助教骚扰和亲密伴侣暴力）。方差分析发现，对不同干预策略的旁观者的评价存在情境差异，尽管什么都不做的旁观者总是受到最负面的评价。然而，旁观者的性别并不影响评估，这表明男性和女性的干预期望是相似的。这些结果表明，虽然存在支持干预行为的潜在规范，但情境特征会影响大学生是否认为向当局求助、对抗肇事者或进行间接干预是否合理。 这项研究的中心意义是，旁观者干预培训应该为学生提供在各种性别暴力情境中练习干预行为的机会，以建立他们的干预策略储备，从而提高他们克服评价抑制的能力。