Miss Genovese Murder Case

The sad events that took place during the murder of Miss Genovese left many wondering as to the reason why the 38 law abiding citizens did not intervene. However, many people sought to understand this occurrence with concerns being raised from all quarters. The sad story got the attention of most scholars among them prominent psychologists such as John Darley and Bibb Latane. The two became interested in understanding the murder of Genovese and in particular the reason why the 38 people who watched for almost forty minutes did not help either passively or actively. Darley and Latane experimented in 1968 four years after the murder of Genovese. The two social Psychologist carried out the famously known Bystander Apathy Experiment. The two discovered that the presence of other bystanders minimizes an individual’s feeling of personal responsibility hence reducing
the speed of response (Darley and Latane 377).
Darley and Latane (1969) carried out a series of experiments in an attempt to get conclusive evidence for bystander effect as witnessed in the murder of Kitty.
The smoke under the door experiment was carried out to test the responsiveness of individuals to an emergency. During the investigations, subjects were asked to fill out questionnaires in a room where the study was to be carried out. Smoke was added into the room through a vent on the wall. One condition involved a single subject, and the results showed that 75% of the lone subject took the initiative to report the incident. The second situation involved three naive subjects and the results indicated that 38% acted by reporting the presence of smoke in the room. Moreover, the final state involved three naïve subjects and two confederates who had been instructed to take notice of the smoke but make no attempt to take action. During this experiment, it was discovered that only 10% reported the incident. Therefore, the researchers concluded that when people are in a group, they tend to fear little and hence, less likely to act (Latané and Darley
251).
Furthermore, bystander effect attracted more experiments by the two Social Psychologist Latane and Darley. In one instance, they carried out a second test, “The Telephone Conversation.” During this experiment, students were selected to take part in an experiment. Each student was placed in a single room where he or she would share collage challenges with other participants through a communication system. During the experiment, one of the participants acted as though he had an epileptic seizure. In the first condition, the subjects were told that they were one of the two subjects. The results in this condition showed that 85% of the subject responded. In the condition where students were told they were six of them, only 31% responded to the call for help from the subject thought to be having an epileptic seizure. This gave rise to what both Darley and Latane called Diffusion of Responsibility. This term refers to a psychological phenomenon in which an individual is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction while others are present (Darley and Latane 179). This build upon what the two psychologists had earlier termed as the bystander effect. “The bystander effect refers to the phenomena that an individual’s likelihood of helping decreases when passive bystanders are present in a critical situation (Heene, Wicher and Kainba 517).”