The greater the number of onlookers, they found, the less likely people were to intervene.
Darley, sought to replicate real-life emergencies through a series of lab experiments with people who did not know one another. Professor Latané, along with the social psychologist John M. Bibb Latané, a social psychologist who helped pioneer the field of bystander intervention in the years following the Kitty Genovese murder, described another dynamic at play: the diffusion of responsibility that can lead to inaction among strangers who witness a crime. In many of the instances, several strangers worked together to calm a fight.įear is not the only factor that determines whether bystanders act in such moments. In a 2019 study published in the journal American Psychologist, researchers in Britain and the Netherlands reviewed surveillance footage of 200 violent altercations in three countries and found that bystanders had intervened nine out of 10 times. Such incidents, experts say, are actually quite rare. And in the intervening years, researchers have found that popular beliefs about the cold detachment of urban dwellers is largely a canard, one sustained by headline-grabbing media accounts of people who appear to ignore a crime in progress. The crime also gave birth to an entire branch of psychology dedicated to understanding the behavioral dynamics of people confronted by public violence. Although many key details of the article have since been debunked - the claim that 38 people witnessed the crime, for one, was greatly exaggerated - the account gained international attention and fueled a largely one-side debate about the perils of urban living. She was a bar manager who was stabbed to death outside her building in Queens while three dozen neighbors supposedly ignored her cries for help. “Given the level of ethnic violence against Asians that has been widely reported in recent months, it’s all the more puzzling why no one saw fit to intervene to help those two victims.”īut those who study what’s known as the bystander effect say the narrative of callous apathy is an outdated trope that dates back to a New York Times account of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. “New York has, once again, cemented its longstanding reputation for apathy,” wrote Alex Lo, a columnist for The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.