Pushkin

On the morning of March 13, 1964, a murder took place in Queens, New York that shook the entire country.

The crime itself was awful, but the behavior of bystanders who witnessed the event caused widespread revulsion in years of national soul searching.

The incident became the imbitus for setting up the 911 emergency call system that we have today, and transformed the path of psychological research for decades to come.

I first heard the story when I took intro-psych as a college freshman back in the 90s.

I dug out my old textbook to see how it was described.

Here it is on page 544 of Peter Gray's Psychology, second edition.

In a normally quiet neighborhood in New York City, a young woman named Kitty Genovisi was brutally attacked for a period of 30 minutes outside her apartment building.

Her screams drew the attention of at least 38 people who watched through their apartment windows while she was repeatedly stabbed and finally murdered.

Not one of the bystanders came to her aid, or even called the police.

The incident stirred a national outcry.

Have we become so ennured to horror that we simply watch it without lifting a finger?

More than 25 years on, I still remember how shocked I was by that paragraph.

Several dozen people stood there and watched Kitty scream.

How could so many people witness something so awful and just do nothing?

At the time, psychologists were still trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, and they began to think that awful incidents weren't just the result of a small number of uncaring people.

But might instead reflect a wider and more sinister aspect of human nature.

Social psychologists John Darley and BiblaNA decided to test that out.

In a now famous 1968 study, they created an experimental emergency.

They brought college students into the lab, put them inside a room all by themselves, and hooked them up to a headphone intercom system.

An experimenter explained that the subject would be taking part in a conversation about college life with either one, two, or five other anonymous students.

All of whom were in different rooms.

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