User:Socpsy wikitask/Altruism in society: The legacy of Kitty Genovese and the 38 witnesses

In our society, there are thousands of people asking for help of different kinds in every minute. Why would some people act as a ‘nameless hero’ and sacrifice even his life for a person he/she simply does not know, while others act so indifferently and apathetically when witnessing a crime of outrageous savageness towards an innocent and weaponless pedestrian? There are indeed several dispositional and situational factors we should look deep down into when judging the following controversial murder case.

On 13 March 1964, Kitty Genovese, the 28-year-old young female was randomly chosen and stabbed by a man who said he simply wanted to ‘kill a woman’ in New York. What has troubled most of the citizen at that time was the fact that 38 people was indeed witnessing and doing nothing during the incident. Kitty screamed and called for help for several times and the apathetic onlookers did not even try to help by calling the police. The murderer went on his stab for consecutive three times and finally putting Kitty to death soon afterward.

1.	Gender Difference Gender difference plays an important role in determining the presence or absence of help received and offered. Both the gender of the victim and the potential helper matters. Research shows that when the gender of the victim is female (Latane & Nida, 1981) and in addition, if she looks attractive (Piliavin & Unger, 1985), she will be more likely to receive help. Stereotype gives us information that women are more dependent and helpless, and attractiveness helps drawing attention and proximity.

But why, in this case, Kitty was not help despite she is a female? To give an answer to this question, the gender of the potential helpers should be taken into account. Research shows that men are more likely to help in seemingly more aggressive incidents, while women are more likely to give a hand in mild, non-aggressive and emotion-related situations. This is obviously due to the difference in strength between the two sexes. Women, knowing that they are physically less able than male, would hold back from altruistic behavior when encountering aggressive acts, while men, understanding their strength, would be more likely to offer help in violent situations.

2.	Perceived level of need of victim

The victim’s level of need is one of the powerful determinants of altruistic behaviour and whether there is anything about the victim that suggests it might be costly to render assistance.

In Kitty Genovese’s case, one of the factors that influenced such inhumane ignorance of the neighbours could be their judgement on the victim’s level of need. According to the detective who was interviewed, the killer made three stabs before the victim was killed. The intervals between the attempts illustrated an atmosphere of a couple’s argument. Moreover the unpleasant incident happened in mid-night which was dark with not many street lights; as a result the neighbours could not see the incident clearly and underestimated the victim’s level of need. Furthermore, since none of neighbour stood out to help, conformity occurred to which all the neighbours were conformed to believe victim’s level of need was low. All these factors led the neighbours to believe the incident was not an emergency and did not give immediate aid.

3.	Diffusion of responsibility The bystander effect refers to the situation in which people are less likely to provide help when they are in groups than when they are alone. The bystander effect is believed to occur because of diffusion of responsibility, when the responsibility is divided among many, everyone thinks that someone else will help. Bystanders who feel anonymous (e.g. part of a large crowd) are less likely to help. In Kitty Genovese’s case, her neighbors may have seen lights in other windows and assumed that other neighbors may have heard the scream and that someone else had already called. Thoughts like these, made possible by awareness of other bystanders without knowing what the others were doing, diffused the responsibility to help among all the bystanders present. As one neighbor said, “I just don’t want to be involved” The more bystanders, the less individual responsibility. Therefore at the end only one neighbor called the police and Kitty was killed without help.

4.	Pluralistic ignorance

The absence of altruistic behavior during the accident, despite the obvious presence of a large number of bystanders, can be explained by pluralistic ignorance. There are two important elements accounting for this factor: (1) ambiguity and (2) bystanders relationship.

In Kitty’s case, witnesses who were interviewed afterwards claimed that some of them believed that it was just a pure couple argument, while others did not see the emergency of the matter as mentioned in the above. This adequately reflected the ambiguity of the incident, as further strengthened by the non-altruistic and ignorant behavior of all other bystanders. Furthermore, since all bystanders were not familiar with each other, they tended not to discuss the matter at that moment and thus, deferred and made absent the helping behavior. The pluralistic ignorance led the bystanders to reinforce each other’s non-altruistic behavior and thus bystanders tended to underestimate the emergency of the situation and believed that no immediate intervention was required.

5.	Ability Perceived incapability to stop the assault may account for the absence of intervention during the tragedy despite being witnessed by a group of about 38 neighbours. Capability can be sub-divided into two elements, which is the perceived effectiveness of altruistic acts and the knowledge about the circumstances (Manning, Levine & Collins, 2007).

Regarding Kitty’s incident, a witness reported that he saw Kitty lay down, screaming miserably and a man was bending over and beating her. The scene was enough to scare him off and he lacked confidence in stopping the severe violent act (despite the influence of gender difference as mentioned). Another situational factor that has to be considered is that there was no 911 system in place in 1964, and calls to the local police station were reportedly not always welcomed by officers who would often give callers “the bitter edge of their tongues”. This further prevented witnesses from actually engaged in seeking police’s assistance.

Concerning the knowledge about the circumstances, the spatial arrangement of the buildings in which witnesses were located and the site of the fatal attacks made it impossible for all but one of the known witnesses to observe the attack or to witness the sexual assault and the murder in the stairwell. Being ignorant about the real case but only hearing the shout made it hard for the witnesses to bring their concern about the instance into direct intervention.

To whom should we put the blame on? Is that the witnesses should be denounced as heartless for their non-intervention or it was actually the distinct circumstance at the time inducing their seemingly cruel acts? It would be advisable to take others’ perspective and pay heed to their positions in social contexts and other situational factors governing their acts, rather than attributing all their acts to their own sake. Correcting the fundamental attribution error would be a vital goal of social functioning and this guides us the way to be more considerate when engaging in interpersonal interaction.