On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her home in Queens, New York. It took the killer thirty minutes to kill Genovese. During those thirty minutes, nobody answered her cries for help or called the police. Surprisingly, thirty-eight people witnessed the murder.
Sociologists John Darley and Bibb Latane looked into the Kitty Genovese incident. They found that Kitty Genovese was a victim of the bystander effect.
According to Darley and Latane, the bystander effect is a socio-psychological phenomenon that states that the victimâÂÂs chances of receiving help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders. In other words, if the number of bystanders in an emergency situation increases, the victimâÂÂs chances of receiving help decreases. Two factors that make up the bystander effect are the diffusion of responsibilities and pluralistic ignorance.
When faced in emergency situations, each bystander perceives a fraction of the responsibility. According to David Newman in Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, if there was only one bystander in an emergency situation, that one bystander would feel 100% responsible for taking action. Newman also goes on to note that if there were ten bystanders, each bystander would feel as though they had a tenth of the responsibility. Those ten bystanders carry less weight than the weight that the single bystander carries. This minimizes the obligation to take action. This concept is known as diffusion of responsibilities. Because there were thirty-eight bystanders in the Kitty Genovese incident, each bystander felt less responsible and less obligated to help out Genovese.
When a teacher asks her class to write notes, a student who did not pay attention would look at his classmates to figure out what to do. Similarly, bystanders often look at other bystanders to figure out what to do. If one person doesnâÂÂt take action, another person would believe that nothing is wrong and wouldnâÂÂt take action as well. A larger group of people further reinforces the ignorance. This is known as pluralistic ignorance. The thirty-eight bystanders in the Kitty Genovese incident did nothing, since everyone else didnâÂÂt do anything. They thought that everyone else didnâÂÂt do anything because nothing was wrong.
There is a way to offset the bystander effect. A victim must break pluralistic ignorance and stop the diffusion of responsibility. To do so, a victim must ask a single bystander for help, rather than a whole group of bystanders. By calling on a single bystander for help, the victim âÂÂshines the spotlightâ on the bystander. This gives the bystander more responsibility, making him take action. When one bystander helps out the victim, the other bystanders will see that there is something wrong and start to help out the victim too. This offsets the bystander effect and creates safety in an emergency situation.
Kitty Genovese didnâÂÂt receive help because of bystander effect. If there were fewer bystanders, Genovese would have had a greater chance of surviving.