Page 66 - The Social Animal

48 The Social Animal

pressures to hurt people, we often avoid taking action when pre-
sented with opportunities to help others.

The Uninvolved Bystander as
Conformist

In 1964, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to
death in New York City. This was a tragic event but not, in itself, a
particularly novel occurrence. After all, in a major population center,
brutal murders are not uncommon. What is interesting about this
event is that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors came to their win-
dows at 3:00 AM in response to the victim’s screams of terror—and
remained at their windows watching in fascination for the 30 min-
utes it took her assailant to complete his grisly deed, during which
time he returned for three separate attacks. No one came to her as-
sistance; no one so much as lifted the phone to call the police until
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it was too late. Why?
Well, perhaps the onlookers were sleepy or dazed. After all, peo-
ple are hardly in full control of their mental faculties at three o’clock
in the morning. Perhaps. But it was in broad daylight that Eleanor
Bradley, while shopping on Fifth Avenue in New York City, tripped,
fell, and broke her leg. She lay there for 40 minutes in a state of shock
while literally hundreds of passersby paused momentarily to gawk at
her and then kept on walking.
Why did these bystanders fail to help? Are people impervious to
the distress of others? Have they become so accustomed to disaster
that they can be nonchalant in the face of pain and violence? Were
the bystanders in these situations different from you and me in some
way? The answer to all of these questions appears to be no. Interviews
conducted with the bystanders in the Genovese murder revealed that
they were anything but nonchalant—they were horrified. Why, then,
didn’t they intervene? This is a difficult question to answer.
One possible explanation concerns the existence of different
norms for helping in large cities as opposed to smaller towns. Sev-
eral experiments have found that the likelihood of receiving help is
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greater in nonurban than in urban locales. However, these studies ex-
amined small requests for help—change for a quarter, the correct
time, and so forth. Whether these rural-urban differences occur in