Why Did Kitty Genovese s Neighbors Fail For Take Action...

On March 13, 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed repeatedly while several neighbors were vaguely aware of the unfolding events occurring outside. The lack of action on the neighbors’ part led to Genovese dying shortly after. Why did Kitty Genovese’s neighbors fail to take action quickly? The psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latanà © (1968) were interested in the Genovese incident and sought to find the answer to this psychological phenomenon. In their experiment, Darley and Latanà © hypothesized that the higher number of bystanders would decrease helping behavior and vice versa. The two manipulated the number of confederates during each trial and recorded the time it took for the participants to report the simulated seizure. Their results confirmed that if were more confederates, each participant would feel less pressured to help, leading to the discovery of the bystander effect. The bystander effect is defined as the higher the number of people who notice an emergency, the less of a chance that those bystanders will help the victim (as cited in Aronson, Wilson, Akert, Sommers, 2015). The importance of the bystander effect is unparalleled because it determines whether humans will still help in a situation when there are other people available. Bystanders can deal with situations ranging from the mundane to the dire, but what matters is the number of those who take action. Inspired by the Genovese case, my partner and I wanted to see if the Tufts community, which