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Kitty Genovese: A Case Study

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In some circumstances, the norms favoring intervention may be weakened, leading bystanders to resolve the conflict in the direction of nonintervention (Darley and Latane, 1968). One circumstance may be the present of other witnesses. However, the pressure does not focus on the observer when there are several onlookers present. Potential blames could be distributed and it is superbly reasonable to assume that whatever punishment that happens to any individual is slight. His own intervention would be redundant (Darley and Latane, 1968). Overall, a hypothesis was made after these considerations that the more bystanders there are during an emergency, the less people got involved to provide aid. Therefore, being able to test this situation, he …show more content…

However, John Darley and Bibb Latane (1968) studied to see the reactions among a few bystanders if an emergency were to occur. They were the first to demonstrate the bystander’s effect. In this article, someone is responsible on a real life situation of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was attacked, sexual assaulted and killed in New York with approximately 38 bystanders (Darley & Latane, 1968). This poor woman was not even helped out. This murder has become the example of the “bystander effect”. The bystander effect results from different people misunderstanding an emergency situation as a non-emergency based on what happened in the past in other people life. On the other hand, in the case of Kitty Genovese, one of the bystanders thought it was a lover situation and did not want to get involved in it. This caught a lot of attention. Even though the man that attacked Genovese got scared off, he knew that no one was going to help her out at all. After this case, a psychologist named this the Genovese syndrome because there were several people out and no one tried to …show more content…

With this being said, those who do nothing to help are just letting negative people and negative activities take over. It seems that bystanders today can be so heartless and very undependable at times. Things like this should not be taking advanced of nor should it be tolerated. It is serious and undoubtedly important to not be a bystander at any point. However, if one so happens to be a bystander take action and help the victim. A person does not have to go out on the scene to say a word, but just calling the police are trying to help out. Someone to just stand back and watch or even ignore a crime of any trouble, such as; beating up, bullying, murdering, or raping someone and letting it happen it can get worse. Although incidents like the murder of Genovese do not happen every day, it is important to recognize things like this case. Bystander intervention in emergency matters, and need to be paid close attention upon. However, being a bystander is just being in a crime and building negative impact on one’s community. The bystander effect, particularly diffusion of responsibility has an impact on social events and it is important to study this information to understand why people handle situations. Because several situations have considered where the phenomenon will

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