ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the tragic story of Kitty Genovese. The New York Times reported it this way: For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. Humanitarian norms and the whisperings of conscience prompt them to intervene, but a host of fears, both rational and irrational, hold them back. Darley and Latans results cast doubt on explanations for bystander unresponsiveness that refer to apathy or indifference. Such explanations assert that crowds of people who stand by and do nothing when others are suffering before their very eyes are somehow different from the rest of us: desensitized by modern culture or just naturally uncaring. The more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.