The Bystander Effect On Kitty Genovese

Ever heard of Kitty Genovese? You ought to have. Unfortunately, the people under whose very noses she was dying have most likely remained perpetually haunted by it. In the early hours of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death by a man wielding a knife (a repeat offender, Winston Mosely) outside her apartment building in Queens, NY.

The passageway between the two buildings was visible from many apartments on both sides and, while accounts differ, it seems that between 38 and 49 witnesses had stood at the windows and gazed down at the helpless girl.

A question for the reader: Can you guess how many people called the police?

That’s right. None!

This was not the only but it’s arguably the most poignant instance of what was later named The Bystander effect. In a situation that could clearly be labeled as one requiring emergency action, the interesting phenomenon of responsibility diffusion seems to take place. When asked why they hadn’t made the call, the interviewees claimed that they’d presumed someone else had already done it… and so they proceeded to watch.

Another study was performed at a bus station, where an actor posed as an older man having a heart attack. When the bus station was crowded, the response

Where was the Power To generate an action without domination, like calling the police without putting oneself in harm’s way; or the Power With, where a group bands together as more than a sum of its parts? To paraphrase Wilhelm Reich in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” (1972), people are systematically sexually suppressed and this suppressed primal energy made Nazism seem more appealing to the mass consciousness than the simultaneously emerging Communist thought, for example. Are we only united in our repression? Is there a perverse side of the human psyche that felt relief watching a horrific murder and doing nothing about