The “Genovese Syndrome”, also known as the Spectator Effect, is a concept that has been used to explain the psychological phenomenon by which a person becomes immobilized at the moment of witnessing an emergency situation where he or she would be expected to provide support to someone in significant danger.

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

Kitty Genovese and the spectator effect

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

There’s little more we can say about his life. What we do know, since he has generated a whole series of hypotheses within social psychology, is how he died. In the early morning of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered while trying to enter her building , located in New York City.

According to the official version, the man who murdered her followed her from her car to the building’s entrance, where he stabbed her. Kitty tried to avoid him and screamed for help for more than 30 minutes , while the murderer continued his aggressions and even raped her before killing her. What happened during those minutes is what has been called Genovese Syndrome: none of the neighbours tried to help her.

The prestigious New York Times reported the news, which was covered by journalist Martin Gansberg. Some time later the topic was compiled in a book whose author was the editor of the same newspaper, A.M. Rosenthal, entitled “38 witnesses”. Among the events narrated, the New York Times assured that, in total, 38 neighbors had witnessed the 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 various psychological studies on why people become immobilized or indifferent to other people’s emergency. These studies later influenced scientific research on inhibition of behaviour during individual emergencies when living within a group.

Intervention in emergency situations: Darley and Latané’s experiment

The pioneering experiment on this phenomenon was conducted by John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, and published in 1968. The researchers hypothesized that the people who witnessed the murder did not help precisely because there were so many people. Through their 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, participants were less likely to intervene individually.

They explained that people became individually indifferent to the emergency when they were in groups , because they assumed that someone else would react or would 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 “spectator effect”.

Likewise, in other experiments the notion of the diffusion of responsibility was developed, 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 been troubled recently 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 educational impact that this version had . The news about the murder of Kitty Genovese generated scientific hypotheses that were reflected in textbooks and school books on psychology, shaping a whole theory on pro-social behaviour.

More recent versions of the New York Times itself report that some facts have been misinterpreted, and that the initial news may have fallen into different biases. The main criticism has been that the number of witnesses has been exaggerated . Recently it has been questioned whether there were indeed 38 people who witnessed the murder.

Subsequent journalistic investigations speak of the presence of only 12 people, who probably did not witness the entire attack, since the latter had different phases and locations before the murder on the portal. The number of attacks originally proposed by the New York Times has also 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, and 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 has traditionally underpinned the Spectator 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 at 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. Abstract retrieved July 3, 2018. Available at http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1968-08862-001.
  • Communication iS + D. (2012). Psychosocial Experiments – No. 7: The Diffusion of Responsibility (Darley and Latané, 1968). Retrieved July 3, 2018. Available at http://isdfundacion.org/2012/12/28/experimentos-psicosociales-nº-7-la-difusion-de-la-responsabilidad-darley-y-latane/.