I would begin with the tragic and well known case of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, and was murdered there in 1964. Her case received enormous attention and commentary, and you have probably heard some version of her story. As reported in the New York Times, thirty-eight individuals watched the murder from their apartment windows, but only one called the police, and by then it was too late.
Over the years, I have described this shocking incident many times. So have other social psychologists teaching similar courses, and so did the social scientists who sought to explain how witnesses could exhibit such callous indifference to a horrific crime taking place before their eyes.
Here’s the trouble: the standard account of the Kitty Genovese case is wrong in some of its crucial details.
Kitty’s brother, Bill Genovese, produced a film last year called The Witness. In it, he documents that some bystanders were not indifferent: one witness shouted out the window at the attacker, another witness held Kitty in her arms as she died, and several called the police during the attack.
So what does it mean that social scientists have been retelling an incorrect version of this story for over fifty years as a paradigmatic example of extreme bystander indifference? Well, among other things, it means that inadvertently we have been perpetuating what could rightly be called a false narrative—a version of events that, while partly true, had been shaped, in this case by a newspaper report, to elicit strong negative emotions like anger, fear, or disgust.
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