Essay On Kitty Genovese

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This chapter focuses on the the brutal rape and murder of Kitty Genovese, whose murder occurred in downtown New York over the span of under an hour. This experiment also took place around the time of post 9/11. Around this time, the number of suicides also went up. Despite the murder occurring in an area populated with many citizens, no witness decided to call for help or aided Genovese in any way. After this horrific tragedy, scientists John Darley and Bibb Latane of New York University conducted experiments to understand the reasoning behind the lack of intervention in the case of Kitty Genovese. In their experiment, both of the scientists recruited students to sit in separate rooms and discuss life in New York and being a student at NYU. …show more content…
Based on the experiment's results, if a student was alone, they were more likely to help the student (85% chance). However, when the students were in a group, they were less likely to help. Based on the second experiment, the scientists recruited a few college students to portray as actors in the scenario along with several other naive college students. The college students had to then sit into a room and complete a survey about college life. In the initial part of the experiment, both Darley and Latane let out a non hazardous gas from the room’s ventilation system. This gas appeared to be a strong smoke to the naive students, but the actors did not show any alarm. Out of all the students, only one ended up reporting the smoke to the experimenter. However, when the students were alone, almost all of them reported the presence of the smoke. Based on the results from both of the experiments, it seems as if the subjects within a scenario were less likely to take on the responsibility for addressing a problem when surrounded by other subjects. Throughout the chapter, the five aspects of helping are listed as sections:

38 Who Saw Murder Police

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