Genovese syndrome: what it is and how it affects Social Psychology

The "Genovese Syndrome", also known as the Bystander Effect, is a concept that has served to explain the psychological phenomenon through which a person immobilizes when witnessing an emergency situation where they would be expected to provide support to someone in danger important.

In this article we will see what is Genovese Syndrome, why it has been called in this way and what has been its importance, both in psychology and in the media.

• Related article: "What is social psychology?"

Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect

Catherine Susan Genovese, better known as Kitty Genovese, was an American woman of Italian descent who grew up in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. She was born on July 7, 1935, her family moved to Connecticut, and she worked as a restaurant manager.

We can say little more about her life. What we do know, since it has spawned a whole series of hypotheses within social psychology, is how she died. The early morning of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese she was killed while she was trying to enter his building, located in New York City.

According to the official version, the man who murdered her followed her from her car to the building portal, where he stabbed her. kitty he tried to avoid it and yelled for help for more than 30 minutes, while the murderer continued to attack her and even raped her before killing her. What happened in the course of those minutes is what has been dubbed the Genovese Syndrome: none of her neighbors tried to help her.

The prestigious New York Times spread the news, by journalist Martin Gansberg. Some time later the subject was compiled in a book authored by the editor of the same newspaper, A.M. Rosenthal, titled "38 witnesses." Among the events narrated, the New York Times assured that, in total, 38 neighbors had witnessed her murder, and none of them had bothered to notify the authorities.

For many years this version was taken as the true one, and gave rise to different studies psychological questions about why people become immobilized or indifferent to the foreign emergency. These studies subsequently had an impact on scientific research on the inhibition of behavior during individual emergencies when living within a group.

• You may be interested in: "Forensic Psychology: definition and functions of the forensic psychologist"

Intervention in emergency situations: the Darley and Latané experiment

The pioneering experiment on this phenomenon was conducted by John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, and published in the year 1968. The researchers hypothesized that the people who witnessed the murder did not help precisely because there were so many people. Through his research, they suggested that when participants were individual witnesses to an emergency, they were more likely to provide help. Whereas, when an emergency was witnessed as a group, the participants were less likely to intervene individually.

They explained that people individually became indifferent to the emergency when in groups, because they assumed that someone else would react or have already helped (precisely because it was an urgent situation).

In other words, the researchers concluded that the number of people who witness an attack is a determining factor in individual intervention. They called the latter the “bystander effect”.

Likewise, in other experiments it was developed the notion of diffusion of responsibility, through which it is explained that the presence of different observers inhibits the response of a spectator when he is alone.

Media impact of Genovese Syndrome

What has recently been problematized about the Kitty Genovese case is the New York Times' own version of the circumstances in which the murder occurred. Not only has this been problematized, but the media and pedagogical impact that this version had. The news about the murder of Kitty Genovese generated scientific hypotheses that were embodied in manuals of study and in school textbooks of psychology, configuring a whole theory about behaviors prosocial.

More recent versions of the New York Times itself report that some facts have been misinterpreted, and that the initial news could have fallen into different biases. The main criticism has been that of having exaggerated the number of witnesses. It has recently been questioned whether there were actually a total of 38 people witnessing the murder.

Subsequent journalistic investigations speak of the presence of only 12 people, who probably did not witnessed the complete attack, since the latter had different phases and locations before arriving at the murder in the portal. Likewise, the number of attacks originally proposed by the New York Times has been questioned.

Not only that, but recent testimonies speak of the fact that at least two neighbors did call the police; putting in tension both the investigations carried out decades ago by the American newspaper, such as the inactivity of the authorities in the face of a crime that could easily be justified as “passionate”. Ultimately, and within social psychology, the variables and the theoretical approach that have traditionally supported the Bystander Effect have been problematized.

Bibliographic references:

• Dunlap, D. (2016). 1964| How Many Witnessed the Murder of Kitty Genovese?. New York Times. Retrieved July 3, 2018. Available in https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/insider/1964-how-many-witnessed-the-murder-of-kitty-genovese.html.
• Darley, J. m. & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4, pt. 1): 377-383. Summary retrieved July 3, 2018. Available in http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1968-08862-001.
• iS+D communication. (2012). Psychosocial Experiments - No. 7: The Diffusion of Responsibility (Darley & Latané, 1968). Retrieved July 3, 2018. Available in http://isdfundacion.org/2012/12/28/experimentos-psicosociales-nº-7-la-difusion-de-la-responsabilidad-darley-y-latane/.