What is Herd Syndrome?

“We are Hyperboreans and we are well aware of far outside the crowd we stand.”

Neitzsche on Pindar.

I would say Bystander effect is symptomatic of, as well as, aids and abets the herd syndrom to worsen it.

I believe it’s when people fear being left out or left behind the group, so they react to peer pressure. People are influenced by their peers to follow trends, have certain opinions, and buy things, all out of fear of being different from the group.

That’s my understanding anyway. I think the bystander effect is a different thing. The idea is that the presence of bystanders decreases the chances of an individual lending assistance in am emergency situation. A notable example of this would be in NYC in 2000. During a parade, a group of men began tearing women’s clothes off and molesting them. A huge number of people witnessed this, but no emergency calls were made, and no assistance was offered. Even the police ignored the situation.

The two are certainly not the same, but not opposites either.

Herd syndrome has to do with how an indvidual will act once he’s part of a large group (kind of like crowd theory but we’ve dispensed with that archaic theory long ago), that an invididual will follow the herd even if he disagrees because of conformity to the group winning out. The bystander effect is not the opposite of herd syndrome (not that there is an opposite). It has to do with how people will react to some situation if they see other people there reacting to the same situation. Usually, people talk about it in a negative way like ‘oh she was being gutted and we all saw it but no one did anything.’

I’ll wait until some more people answer and see if it feels right to agree with them.

P.s. Herd syndrome has to do with a safety-in-numbers feeling. It takes less energy to rely on the judgements of others of your kind and hope/assume they are correct, than it does to examine everything about your environment yourself.
Bystander syndrome involves making assumptions about what the people in the herd are thinking/doing. Not really the same as herd but in the same context.