Truth Is

In the Chapter 4 of Lauren Slater’s Opening Skinner’s Box “In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: Darley and Latane’s Training Manual-A Five Stage Approach” we learn about the Kitty Genovese incident where we learn about the bystander effect, and how it makes people do cruel things when it’s not their intention to do so. The incident took place in Queens, New York. Kitty was walking home after work when a man came up and stabbed her in the back. She screamed “Oh my god! He stabbed me! Please help me!” (95). The neighbors lights come on and a man shouts, “let that girl alone” (95). The Stabber runs away, and the building lights go off. After a while the stabber comes back seeing nothing happened and starts to stab her again. Again the lights come on and he runs away. Then the lights go back off and Kitty drags herself in to a building where the stabber comes back and kills her. After 30 minutes someone decides to call the cops, which find her dead. There were thirty-eight witnesses and no body called the cops when they herd the screams of a woman not once, but twice. When they were asked why they didn’t contact the police or help? They said they were confused and shocked. Dr. Banay a psychologist said, “They were deaf, paralyzed, hypnotized with excitation” (97).

The bystander effect prevented the witnesses from calling the police, which made them look cruel. There are a couple of reasons why no one called the police, but first we need to know what is the bystander effect. Slater defines it as, “Pluralistic ignorance” (104). People are too selfish to put in the effort to think for them selves there for they copy others surrounding them. The bystander effect happened in the Kitty Genovese for many reasons. The first reason w...

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...izure experiments showed how a group could change the way we act because we will follow what the group does also known as group mentality. When the students were put in imaginary groups, and saw no one reacting the group mentality prevented the student to react and getting help. Darley and Latane’s smoke experiment also thought us about how people are selfish, and will think about their appearance in society instead of essentially saving a whole building full of people from a potential fire. One great thing about our society is that it encourages people to be selfless leaders in difficult situations in order to prevent incidents like Kitty Genovese from happening. Kitty died because every person who witnessed the incident was selfish and put the responsibility on an imaginary leader. No one’s born cruel or a selfless leader, but we are all given the power to choose.