38 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police
What was Gansberg’s Social Message?
Gan
38 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police
What was Gansberg’s Social Message?
Gansberg Makes the residents of the Kew Gardens apartment residents look very shitty.
How does their behavior prove the existence of “The Bystander Effect”?
Contextual Research: Fact Checking About 60 Years Later
What new details can we learn about the story?
How might that change our perspective?
Now that you’ve gathered a bit more information, you will present an informed analysis of this newspaper article from 1964.
Time to Write:
Part 1
What is your initial reaction to the story, and the 38 witnesses?
What are your thoughts on “The Bystander Effect?” Do you have any personal knowledge of this social phenomenon also known as”The Diffusion of Responsibility?”
Part 2
What is the impact of the research you have done?
Were there any significant discrepancies that call Gansberg’s article (and his social theory) into question?
Please share any significant context you learned that has changed your perspective on this article from The New York Times.
Clearly explain how the additional context enhances your understanding of Gansberg’s article and the social phenomenon The Bystander Effect.
Part 3
Evaluate your entire experience with Gansberg’s Article.
What is the value of Gansberg’s journalistic work (even if it is riddled with errors)?
Discuss how this Newspaper article has the potential to change lives.
When it is all said and done, what is your opinion of Gansberg’s credibility? The witnesses credibility? Your own credibility as a potential bystander?
2-3 pages
2 outside sources minimum
MLA format
READING:Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police
New York Times
Martin Gansberg
March 27, 1964
For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.
Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.
That was two weeks ago today.
Still shocked is Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations. He can give a matter-of-fact recitation on many murders. But the Kew Gardens slaying baffles him–not because it is a murder, but because the “good people” failed to call the police.
“As we have reconstructed the crime,” he said, “the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35-minute period. He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.”
This is what the police say happened at 3:20 A.M. in the staid, middle-class, tree-lined Austin Street area:
Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was called Kitty by almost everyone in the neighborhood, was returning home from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. She parked her red Fiat in a lot adjacent to the Kew Gardens Long Island Railroad Station, facing Mowbray Place. Like many residents of the neighborhood, she had parked there day after day since her arrival from Connecticut a year ago, although the railroad frowns on the practice.
She turned off the lights of her car, locked the door, and started to walk the 100 feet to the entrance of her apartment at 82-70 Austin Street, which is in a Tudor building, with stores in the first floor and apartments on the second.
The entrance to the apartment is in the rear of the building because the front is rented to retail stores. At night the quiet
neigborhood is shrouded in the slumbering darkness that marks most residential areas.
Miss Genovese noticed a man at the far end of the lot, near a seven-story apartment house at 82-40 Austin Street. She halted. Then, nervously, she headed up Austin Street toward Lefferts Boulevard, where there is a call box to the 102nd Police Precinct in nearby Richmond Hill.
She got as far as a street light in front of a bookstore before the man grabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on in the 10-story apartment house at 82-67 Austin Street, which faces the bookstore. Windows slid open and voices punctuated the early-morning stillness.
Miss Genovese screamed: “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”
From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down: “Let that girl alone!”
The assailant looked up at him, shrugged, and walked down Austin Street toward a white sedan parked a short distance
away. Miss Genovese struggled to her feet.
Lights went out. The killer returned to Miss Genovese, now trying to make her way around the side of the building by the
parking lot to get to her apartment. The assailant stabbed her again.
“I’m dying!” she shrieked. “I’m dying!”
Windows were opened again, and lights went on in many apartments. The assailant got into his car and drove away. Miss Genovese staggered to her feet. A city bus, 0-10, the Lefferts Boulevard line to Kennedy International Airport, passed. It was 3:35 A.M.
The assailant returned. By then, Miss Genovese had crawled to the back of the building, where the freshly painted brown
doors to the apartment house held out hope for safety. The killer tried the first door; she wasn’t there. At the second door, 82-62 Austin Street, he saw her slumped on the floor at the foot of the stairs. He stabbed her a third time–fatally.
It was 3:50 by the time the police received their first call, from a man who was a neighbor of Miss Genovese. In two minutes they were at the scene. The neighbor, a 70-year-old woman, and another woman were the only persons on the street. Nobody else came forward.
The man explained that he had called the police after much deliberation. He had phoned a friend in Nassau County for advice and then he had crossed the roof of the building to the apartment of the elderly woman to get her to make the call.
“I didn’t want to get involved,” he sheepishly told police.
Six days later, the police arrested Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old business machine operator, and charged him with homicide. Moseley had no previous record. He is married, has two children and owns a home at 133-19 Sutter Avenue, South Ozone Park, Queens. On Wednesday, a court committed him to Kings County Hospital for psychiatric observation.
When questioned by the police, Moseley also said he had slain Mrs. Annie May Johnson, 24, of 146-12 133d Avenue, Jamaica, on Feb. 29 and Barbara Kralik, 15, of 174-17 140th Avenue, Springfield Gardens, last July. In the Kralik case, the police are holding Alvin L. Mitchell, who is said to have confessed to that slaying.
The police stressed how simple it would have been to have gotten in touch with them. “A phone call,” said one of the detectives, “would have done it.” The police may be reached by dialing “0” for operator or SPring 7-3100.
Today witnesses from the neighborhood, which is made up of one-family homes in the $35,000 to $60,000 range with the exception of the two apartment houses near the railroad station, find it difficult to explain why they didn’t call the police.
A housewife, knowingly if quite casually, said, “We thought it was a lovers’ quarrel.” A husband and wife both said, “Frankly, we were afraid.” They seemed aware of the fact that events might have been different. A distraught woman, wiping her hands in her apron, said, “I didn’t want my husband to get involved.”
One couple, now willing to talk about that night, said they heard the first screams. The husband looked thoughtfully at the bookstore where the killer first grabbed Miss Genovese.
“We went to the window to see what was happening,” he said, “but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.” The wife, still apprehensive, added: “I put out the light and we were able to see better.”
Asked why they hadn’t called the police, she shrugged and replied: “I don’t know.”
A man peeked out from a slight opening in the doorway to his apartment and rattled off an account of the killer’s second attack. Why hadn’t he called the police at the time? “I was tired,” he said without emotion. “I went back to bed.”
It was 4:25 A.M. when the ambulance arrived to take the body of Miss Genovese. It drove off. “Then,” a solemn police detective said, “the people came out.”
The above reported events are true and took place on March 14, 1964.
The brutal murder of Kitty Genovese and the
disturbing lack of action by her neighbors
became emblematic in what many perceived as an
evolving culture of violence and apathy in the
United States. In fact, social scientists
still debate the causes of what is now known
as “the Genovese Syndrome.”
READING 2
Column: The urban legend of Kitty Genovese and the 38 witnesses
who ignored her blood-curdling screams
BY NICHOLAS GOLDBERG COLUMNIST
SEPT. 10, 2020
When I was growing up in New York City, everyone knew about Kitty Genovese. We all
knew the story of the 28-year-old bar manager who had been robbed, raped and stabbed to
death outside her apartment building in Queens in 1964 while 38 people watched or listened
to her screams outside their apartments but did nothing to stop the attack.
It was more than just another tabloid murder; it was a morality tale — exhibit A for the
argument that cities were alienating and dehumanizing, that there was no such thing as
neighborhood or community, that people were cold, cruel, selfish, indifferent. Even today,
Kitty Genovese’s name is still invoked not just in New York but around the world when
people fail to come to each other’s aid in times of violence and trouble.
Thirty-eight witnesses, the New York Times said, and no one did anything over the 35
minutes the attack was taking place. Not one called the police while it was underway, even
though Genovese was screaming, “Please help me. Please help me.” And why not? “I didn’t
want to get involved,” one neighbor said.
It was an appalling story. It was also wrong.
Last week, we were reminded of that by the obituary of 92-year-old Sophia Farrar, who lived
across the hall from Genovese in 1964, and who rushed to her side that day, forcing open a
wedged door to the vestibule behind the building where the stabbing had taken place
despite the obvious potential danger. Farrar found Genovese in a pool of blood, yelled for a
neighbor to call the police and cradled the bleeding woman until the ambulance arrived,
whispering, “Help is on the way.”
So what about the idea that no one cared or tried to help? What about the 38 cold,
disinterested or fearful people who did nothing?
Let’s back up a moment. When Genovese died it was the New York Times that created the
shocking narrative of indifference and apathy, with a front-page story two weeks after the
murder that began: “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in
Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”
The story — and the number 38 — apparently originated with a conversation between New
York City’s police commissioner and Abe Rosenthal, then the paper’s city editor. But the
number was substantially exaggerated and inadequately checked before being allowed in the
paper.
Some stories become part of the zeitgeist because they seem to encapsulate some elusive
truth or tell us something fundamental about human beings. That was the case with the
Genovese story.
In the years that followed, psychologists and others wrote about the “Kitty Genovese effect”
and the so-called “bystander effect,” which held that the greater the number of bystanders,
the less likely any one of them will intervene. Good Samaritan laws were passed in New
York and elsewhere to encourage people to help victims. The murder helped lead to the
creation of the 911 system, and folk singer Phil Ochs wrote a song inspired by the incident.
Genovese’s name has been cited more than 100 times in the Los Angeles Times. A Fordham
University professor called the case “the most cited incident in social psychology literature
until the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001.”
But though the story took root in the public consciousness, it fell apart on closer inspection.
Books and documentaries began to question and then re-report the facts. In 2016, more
than 50 years after the attack took place, an editor’s note was appended to the original story
in the New York Times saying: “Later reporting by The Times and others has called into
question significant elements of this account.”
In Farrar’s obituary in the New York Times last week, Sam Roberts wrote: “With the benefit
of hindsight, the number of eyewitnesses turned out to have been exaggerated; none
actually saw the attack completely; some who heard it thought it was a drunken brawl or a
lovers’ quarrel; and several people said they did call the police.”
Over the years, Kitty Genovese herself has been fleshed out as more than just a symbol. She
worked as manager at a bar called Ev’s 11th Hour on Jamaica Avenue in Hollis, Queens. She
frequented the folk music scene — on Monday nights she went to Gerde’s Folk City in
Greenwich Village, with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko. The two were lovers but in those
inhospitable, pre-Stonewall days they lived together in Kew Gardens as “roommates.”
Winston Moseley, who confessed to the killing after being arrested five days later during a
burglary, died in prison at age 81 in 2016.
Sophia Farrar died of pneumonia at her home in New Jersey.
Even all these years later, reading about the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese, who was just
starting her adult life, is overwhelmingly sad.
But here’s one small consolation, at least: It is an enormous relief to learn that this classic
narrative of human failing was in fact hyperbole. Even if it took decades to get the story
right, it’s good to know that the reality was more nuanced than the urban legend.
Sure, some neighbors were scared, some were silent, some could and should have done
more. But there were those who acted like friends, like neighbors, like heroes, even at risk to
themselves. Rest in peace, Sophia Farrar
READING 3
The Bystander Apathy Experiment
In 1964 a woman named Kitty Genovese was chased down, sexually assaulted, and murdered
just feet away from her house. The man who did this horrific acts to her was Winston Moseley.
Why I am talking about a murder case? Because during these events Kitty was able to scream fir
help, and 38 witnesses were aware that it was taking place yet chose to do nothing to help the
dying woman.
After the case, psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané were curious how so many people
were able to just stand back and wait for authorities to handle it. They devised an experiment
called the ‘Bystander Apathy Experiment’ in which they recruited university students to
participate. The students would each be talking to other participants in a discussion group;
however, each participant had a separate room. In other words, the conversations would be
taking place over microphones and speakers where either of the participants would not be able to
physically see the person they are talking to.
Each participant is given two minutes to talk during their turn, they do not know that the other
‘participant’ they are talking to is a pre-recorded voice. The subject can be talking to one to five
people, depending on their treatment condition. One of the voices is of an epileptic student who
suffers from seizures. He confesses to the group that he suffers from such disease in his first turn
of speaking to the group. On his second turn, the seizure starts. The pre-recorded voice sounded
something like this:
“I’m… I’m having a fit… I… I think I’m… help me… I… I can’t… Oh my God… err… if
someone can just help me out here… I… I… can’t breathe p-p-properly… I’m feeling… I’m
going to d-d-die if…”
The participant being tested cannot see this person actually having a seizure, therefore can only
hear his reactions. The study based its results off of how long it took the participant to get up,
leave the room, and search for someone to help.
The results are shocking. Only 31% of people went to seek for help. Majority of people did not
even bother to help this suffering man. Much of the results was based off of the treatment
condition the participant was placed in. For example, a participant that was entered in a group
with only one voice was more likely to go seek help compared to a participant who was in a
group with 5 other voices.
It is said that there are two reasons as to why the participants did not react. One being that they
felt as if there was a diffusion of responsibility. In other words, they felt as if other people could
intervene and they are held less responsible. Second being that they are ignorant to the situation.
The participants felt that because no one else was reacting, why should they?
I personally found these results to be incredibly disturbing. To think that someone could be dying
and 38 people can report as witnesses, yet no one tried to intervene is incredible. A bystander can
save a life, so when you see a situation happening and no one else is reacting, don’t stand back
and wait for someone else to be brave. Intervene, because you might be saving someone’s life.
Sites Used:
https://explorable.com/bystander-apathy-experiment
Aggress Behav. 2019 Nov-Dec; 45(6): 598–609.
Published online 2019 Jul 29. doi: 10.1002/ab.21853
Social relations and presence of others predict bystander
intervention: Evidence from violent incidents captured on
CCTV
Lasse Suonperä Liebst, 1 Richard Philpot, 1 , 2 Wim Bernasco, 3 , 4 Kasper Lykke Dausel, 1 Peter
Ejbye‐Ernst, 3 Mathias Holst Nicolaisen, 1 and Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard 1 , 3
Abstract
Are individuals willing to intervene in public violence? Half a century of research on the
“bystander effect” suggests that the more bystanders present at an emergency, the less
likely each of them is to provide help. However, recent meta‐analytical evidence
questions whether this effect generalizes to violent emergencies. Besides the number of
bystanders present, an alternative line of research suggests that pre‐existing social
relations between bystanders and conflict participants are important for explaining
whether bystanders provide help. The current paper offers a rare comparison of both
factors—social relations and the number of bystanders present—as predictors of
bystander intervention in real‐life violent emergencies. We systematically observed the
behavior of 764 bystanders across 81 violent incidents recorded by surveillance
cameras in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bystanders were sampled with a case–control
design, their behavior was observed and coded, and the probability of intervention was
estimated with multilevel regression analyses. The results confirm our predicted
association between social relations and intervention. However, rather than the
expected reversed bystander effect, we found a classical bystander effect, as bystanders
were less likely to intervene with increasing bystander presence. The effect of social
relations on intervention was larger in magnitude than the effect of the number of
bystanders. We assess these findings in light of recent discussions about the influence
of group size and social relations in human helping. Further, we discuss the utility of
video data for the assessment of real‐life bystander behavior.
PART 1
In the presence of others, bystanders are less likely to intervene when they witness
someone in need of help (Darley & Latané, 1968). This bystander effect is one of the
most well‐established findings of psychology (Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007), and is
typically interpreted as the product of a diffusion of responsibility, by which the liability
to help dilutes across the multiple bystanders present (Latané & Nida, 1981).
Paradoxically, although the bystander research field was prompted by the violent
1964‐murder of Kitty Genovese, and the inaction of the witnesses present (but see
Manning et al., 2007), experimental research has rarely examined bystander behavior
in the context of violent attacks (Cherry, 1995; Liebst, Heinskou, & Ejbye‐Ernst, 2018).
This omission is a result of the practical and ethical infeasibility of exposing
participants to objectively or subjectively dangerous study conditions (Osswald,
Greitemeyer, Fischer, & Frey, 2010).
By restricting the analysis of bystander behavior to laboratory settings—in which
neither the victims nor the bystanders are exposed to danger—the field risks isolating
itself away from the phenomenon it initially set out to explain (Mortensen &
Cialdini, 2010). Confirming this concern, in the exceptionally few experimental studies
that have simulated attacks, it is found that bystanders are equally (Fischer,
Greitemeyer, Pollozek, & Frey, 2006), or more (Harari, Harari, & White, 1985) likely to
intervene in the presence of others than when alone. Further, a meta‐analysis of the
experimental literature concludes that the bystander effect attenuates, or even
reverses, in high‐danger study contexts where the victims, the bystanders, or both are
exposed to dangerous situations (Fischer et al., 2011).
Taken together, when uncoupling the experimental evidence into the trivial (e.g., a
pencil spill, a door that needs to be answered) and the more dangerous emergencies,
the classical bystander effect does not seem to generalize across both domains. Rather,
in study contexts where intervention may be dangerous for participants, the presence
of additional bystanders may provide welcome physical support that promotes
intervention (Fischer & Greitemeyer, 2013). In line with this interpretation,
observational evidence from real‐life emergencies captured by surveillance cameras
shows a positive relationship between group size and the number of interventions
(Levine, Taylor, & Best, 2011). Further, a cross‐national video analysis finds that at least
one bystander intervenes in 9 out of 10 public space conflicts, with the likelihood of
victim help increasing with greater bystander presence (Philpot, Liebst, Levine,
Bernasco, & Lindegaard, 2019). The overall finding that individuals do intervene when
it really matters aligns with cross‐cultural anthropological accounts suggesting that
third‐party intervention in everyday conflicts is most likely a human universal
(Boehm, 2000; Brown, 1991; Eibl‐Eibesfeldt, 1989; Fry, 2000).
Shifting away from a situational emphasis on how additional individuals promote
nonintervention, or the potential reversal of such effect, an alternative line of research
stresses the importance of social relations in bystander helping (Levine &
Manning, 2013; Philpot, 2017; Swann & Jetten, 2017). Specifically, those bystanders
who are affiliated with a person in an emergency situation are significantly more likely
to intervene than those who are socially distant. This association is found not only
across experimental and observational studies with humans (Levine, Cassidy, Brazier,
& Reicher, 2002; Lindegaard et al., 2017; Slater et al., 2013) but also in nonhuman
primates (de Waal, 2015). These findings are consistent with an evolutionary theory of
cooperation that expects helping behavior to occur disproportionately between
genetically related or reciprocating individuals (de Waal & Preston, 2017; Axelrod &
Hamilton, 1981; Vázquez, Gómez, Ordoñana, Swann, & Whitehouse, 2017).
Besides de‐escalatory helping, which exists as the main focus of bystander research
(Fischer et al., 2011), group membership is also associated with escalatory
interventions by which third‐parties fight on behalf of their fellow group members
(Black, 1993; Levine, Lowe, Best, & Heim, 2012; Phillips & Cooney, 2005; Swann,
Gómez, Huici, Morales, & Hixon, 2010). Social relations between bystanders and conflict
participants thus seem to foster not only de‐escalatory but also escalatory
interventions.
Despite the coexistence of these partially competing accounts, few attempts have
examined the relative contributions of the number of bystanders and social relations in
explaining bystander intervention. This may result from the methodological
circumstance that “laboratory studies of bystander intervention usually use strangers
as research confederates who help to stage the helping dilemma” (Banyard, 2015, p.
30). Fischer et al. (2011) included bystander‐victim familiarity as a moderator in their
meta‐analysis and found that the magnitude of the bystander effect was not influenced
by whether or not the bystander knew the victim. Similarly, a regression analysis of
in‐depth interviews reports a significant bystander effect in a model in which social
relations are the main predictor of bystander intervention (Phillips & Cooney, 2005). By
contrast, an examination of real‐life bystander intervention in the aftermath of
commercial robberies (Lindegaard et al., 2017) reports a weak reversed bystander
effect in a model where social relations between victims and bystanders, again,
dominates the intervention outcome. While these studies assess the net effects of these
two factors, Levine and Crowther (2008) analyze the interaction between group size
and social group identification and find that this inter‐relationship could both increase
or decrease the likelihood of bystander intervention.
These few studies examining the two factors simultaneously indicate that social
relations outperform the number of bystanders as a predictor of intervention, while the
evidence regarding the positive, vis‐à‐vis the negative, direction of the bystander effect
remains mixed. However, these studies tend to rely on ecologically limited
experimental paradigms and retrospective accounts (Baumeister, Vohs, &
Funder, 2007; Swann & Jetten, 2017). An exception is the work of Lindegaard et al.
(2017), which used video‐based naturalistic observations of bystanders in the
aftermath of nonfatal commercial robberies. However, by analyzing the period after the
offenders had already left the setting, their study provides limited information on
whether bystanders intervene in violent emergencies where intervention may be
dangerous—that is, the condition proposed to attenuate or reverse the bystander
effect. Overall, there is a dearth of direct comparisons of number of bystanders and
social relations as predictors of bystander intervention in violent emergencies. The
present study, which utilizes video recordings of public violent assaults, is the first
systematic observational study to address this gap.
Given the dangerous nature of the violent situations under study, both for the
antagonists and for potential interveners, we predicted a reversed bystander effect,
with a positive association between the number of bystanders and the likelihood of
bystander intervention (Hypothesis 1). We further predicted that bystanders who have
a social relation with a conflict party are more likely to intervene than strangers
(Hypothesis 2). As the evidence supporting the reversed bystander effect is less
uniform than the evidence in favor of social relations, we expected that the effect of
social relations on intervention will be larger in magnitude than the effect of the
number of bystanders (Hypothesis 3). These hypotheses align with the majority of
bystander research that considers intervention as unambiguously prosocial (i.e.,
helping behavior), and should therefore apply to de‐escalatory interventions. Whether
these propositions also fit escalatory interventions, where bystanders become conflict
participants, is an open question that we also explore in the empirical analysis.
We control for other factors that may be related to the intervention likelihood,
including the bystander’s gender (Cross, Copping, & Campbell, 2011; Eagly, 2009),
whether the bystander is a member of the public or is serving an occupational role (e.g.,
bouncer, Hobbs, 2003), whether the event takes place in a nighttime drinking setting
(Levine et al., 2012; Reynald, 2011), and two additional measures that may affect the
bystander’s intervention opportunity: the density of the situation (Macintyre &
Homel, 1997), and the spatial proximity of the bystander to the conflict participants
(Macintyre & Homel, 1997)