By Bibb Latané

Bibb Latané responds to a recent New Yorker article about the Kitty Genovese murder and the research that it sparked. The text of the entire letter appears below (after a short introduction from Latané that accompanied the letter in a message to the Society for Experimental Social Psychology), followed by the edited version that appeared in the New Yorker’s letters section.

In a recent New Yorker review (click here), respected journalist Nicholas Lemann writes about what he calls the “myth” of Kitty Genovese and reflects on the relationship between journalism and social science. I feel he misidentifies the myth and unfairly impugns social scientists, who, admittedly may sometimes be overly cooperative in helping an aggressive reporter justify a story. Although he is complimentary to my own research, I have taken it upon myself to draft a Letter to the Editor which I share with all those who may be interested in the relationship between science and the media or who teach about bystander inhibition in their courses. I attach a link to Lemann’s original article, the initial draft of my full response, and the final edited version that will appear March 31.

  –Bibb

3/17/14 Draft of a Letter to Editor, New Yorker magazine. Click here to see Prof. Lemann’s original review.

THE “MYTH” OF KITTY GENOVESE

Abe Rosenthal was indeed responsible for creating a myth (Nicholas Lemann, “A Call for Help,” March 10), but the myth was not, as Lemann suggests, that some three dozen people heard and failed to report screams on a March night 50 years ago (Lemann thinks fewer people were fully aware of what was happening). Instead, it was Rosenthal’s insistent interpretation that the cause was moral decay, urban alienation, or, most succinctly, “apathy,” which Rosenthal considered an illness, “a symptom of a terrible reality in the human condition (p.81).”

Unconvinced by Rosenthal’s claim that “simply by happenstance all thirty-eight did that night what each one alone might have done any night” (p.12), John Darley, Judith Rodin, Lee Ross, Richard Nisbett and I designed a series of experiments to test the idea that the number that made the story so sensational may have contributed to making it happen. The resulting discoveries, reported in most psychology textbooks as “bystander inhibition” (a more descriptive term than “the Genovese syndrome” or “the bystander effect”), identified at least three relevant social processes: 1. Public cautiousness, or not wanting to stand out from a crowd; 2. Pluralistic ignorance, when bystanders seeing no one acting decide nothing is wrong; and 3. Diffusion of responsibility, or feeling that someone else should or will respond. These processes may combine to reduce an individual’s inclination to help and likely contributed in varying degrees to the myriad of incidents that have come to be known in journalistic circles as “apathy stories.” Failure to respond, far from being a disease, results from normal social influence processes, the understanding of which can be used to help individuals act in closer accord with their moral predispositions.

The Unresponsive Bystander book cover

At a recent Fordham conference, Harold Takooshian distinguished the “little t truth” about the precise number of people who actually thought Kitty was being murdered from the “capital T Truth” that social inhibition rather than apathy governed her neighbors’ hearts and minds as they returned to their beds after hearing screams.

As Lemann tells us, Rosenthal found out about Kitty’s 38 witnesses from asking the police about her killer’s multiple confessions. Ironically, Winston Moseley’s arrest had resulted from a neighbor calling the police to prevent a burglary. That bystanders in similar neighborhoods behaved so differently suggests that disparity in their social context (fewer people at home in daytime, etc,) was more important than any shared moral character in determining their response. It is puzzling that Rosenthal, despite presumably knowing that a citizen report had led to Moseley’s arrest, was so insistent on proclaiming an epidemic of apathy. As historian Marcy Gallo points out, in 1964, the city and the nation were in the midst of an explosion of social mobilization—active engagement rather than apathy—which may have been why Rosenthal’s story triggered such a wave of reaction; his audience very much cared.

Lemann complains “stories like that of the silent witnesses…represent the real danger zone in journalism because they blend the power of instinct—which is about whether something feels true,…—with the respectable sheen of social science.  In his book, Rosenthal groused, “I did not feel, nor do I now, that the sociologists and psychiatrists who commented contributed anything substantial to anybody’s understanding of what happened that night on Austin Street.” But, if he hadn’t assigned a second-day story consisting of quotes from such people, his version of the Genovese murder would not have taken the shape that it did. The experts transformed a crime into a crisis.”

Blaming the furor Rosenthal created on the people he dragooned into responding to his definition of the problem seems hardly fair to social science, especially as Rosenthal ignored the later experimental results demonstrating bystander inhibition and continued to push his “apathy” interpretation into the 1999 edition of his book. Lemann concludes “So the lesson…isn’t that journalists should trust their gut the way Abe Rosenthal did. Better to use your head.” I would add, “And don’t be so quick to distrust the science.” That science, along with the continued interest in the Genovese case, suggests that, despite the myth of apathy, most of us do indeed care about our responsibilities to one another, even if we can be misled by others in choosing not to act. (page numbers refer to Rosenthal, 1964)

Bibb Latané, Senior Fellow, Center for Human Science, Chapel Hill, NC


Final draft of edited letter to appear in April 7 issue of New Yorker magazine.

Abe Rosenthal was indeed responsible for creating a myth, as Nicholas Lemann writes regarding the circumstances surrounding the murder of Kitty Genovese, but the myth was not, as Lemann suggests, that some three dozen people heard and failed to report screams on a March night fifty years ago (Books, March 10th). Instead, it was Rosenthal’s insistence that the cause was moral decay, urban alienation, or “apathy,” which Rosenthal considered a disease, “a symptom of a terrible reality in the human condition.”

Unconvinced by Rosenthal’s claim that simply “by happenstance all thirty-eight did that night what each one alone might have done any night,” colleagues John Darley, Judith Rodin, Lee Ross, Richard Nisbett and I designed experiments to test the idea that the number that made the story so sensational may have contributed to its occurrence. The resulting discoveries identified three distinct social processes now described in standard textbooks as “bystander inhibition.” Far from being an illness, failure to respond results from social influence, the understanding of which can be used to help individuals act in closer accord with their moral predispositions. Our discoveries contributed to the emergence of the now prevailing psychological perspective of “situational determinism,” the idea that behavior arises not so much from within individuals but from the social pressures they face.

Ironically, we now know that the myth of apathy was initiated by a headline written after Kitty’s murderer had been caught—as a result of a citizen reporting a crime in progress, and the reason the story went viral was that New York and the nation were in the midst of a decade of rising—not falling, social concern.

Bibb Latané

Chapel Hill, N.C.