Why Reno’s Free Speech Champions Don’t Have Your Back        

If Kitty Genovese’s name rings a bell, that bell should have a somber tone. Here’s why: it is commonly told that in 1964 Genovese was sexually assaulted and murdered in front of a number of bystanders, all of whom did nothing to stop the crime. The Genovese case has become a noted example of human psychology.

Here is a summary by researchers who discredit many of the assumptions about the Genovese case but nonetheless give support to what has become known as “the bystander effect”:

“The story of the 38 witnesses who watched from their apartments (and then failed to intervene) while Kitty Genovese was murdered on the street below, has an iconic place in social psychology. The events of that night in New York in 1964 paved the way for the development of one of the most robust phenomena in social psychology – Latané and Darley’s (1970) ‘bystander effect’ (the finding that individuals are more likely to help when alone than when in the company of others). It also led to the development of the most influential and persistent account of that effect, the idea that bystanders do not intervene because of a diffusion of responsibility, and that their perceptions of and reactions to potential intervention situations can be negatively affected by the presence (imagined or real) of others” (source).

While this paper’s authors go on to emphasize increased study into “the possibility of groups and crowds as promoters of positive behaviors,” they give a nod toward the validity of the well-researched bystander effect: “the story of the murder made it clear that crowds, and groups more generally, could be dangerous because they promoted inactivity.”

One doesn’t need to go far to find examples of crowd inactivity, especially when the picture isn’t as clear one might assume. For example: what happens when the case isn’t so black and white? What happens when the purported ‘victim’ is in fact the villain cloaked in victim’s clothing?

Read Part II tomorrow.