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Jeff Abrahams
Article Summary
PS101
Professor Nuzzo
Sept. 21, 2009
To Help or Not to Help
The murder of Kitty Genovese was seen as a portal in the true nature of peoples’
willingness to aid another by John M. Darley and Bibb Latané. The two looked at the atrocity as
a way to measure just how indifferent someone can be to the pain of another. In the 35 minutes
that Genovese was murdered, 38 people witnessed the attack. Only one alerted the authorities,
and the murderer got away for a time.
Darley and Latané hypothesized that there was phenomenon behind the apathy in the
Genovese case and in people in general. They coined the phrase diffusion of responsibility to
mean that the more people that one witnesses at an emergency, the belief that someone else will
do something about it also increases. The ideas that someone else will report the accident or
another person is going to call the cops over the disturbance are examples of this.
To try and measure this, Darley and Latané designed an experiment. In varying
situations, college students would take part in what they were told was a conversation through an
intercom with another student about the adjustment “to university life in a highly competitive,
urban environment and what kinds of personal problems they were experiencing.” They would
have two minutes to talk through their microphone before it was another student’s turn, however
the “other” student’s response was merely a recording. The first group thought they were talking
only to one other student, the second to two others, and the third to five.
Each trial started the same – a recording of a student talked about his adjustment, but
added that he suffered from seizures when under stress. The groups proceeded to each member,
