2023-08-02 06:00:04
Find all the episodes of the series “Explorers of psychology” here.
On March 13, 1964, around 3 a.m., a young barmaid, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed and raped at the foot of her building in Queens, New York, first in the middle of the street then in the stairwell, where her attacker leaves her in agony.
This murder – one of 9,360 committed in the United States that year – would have gone almost unnoticed if the editor of the local pages of the New York Times had lunch ten days later with the boss of the municipal police. The two men talk about the accidental arrest of the culprit, who has confessed everything, then the chief of the forces of order laments the inertia of the neighbors of the victim, suggesting that his services have the names of thirty-eight witnesses having witnessed the scene without moving.
Two weeks after the events, the New York Times made his “one” on the case. “Not a single person called the police during the attack”accuses the daily. The fact that this attack, which lasted a total of half an hour, was seen by thirty-eight people “warm and cozy behind the windows of their apartment”as the French writer Didier Decoin put it in a 2009 novel on the Genovese affair (Is this how women die?Grasset), shocks Americans.
Are big cities toxic? Do they produce indifference and apathy? The fate of the young New Yorker launches a societal debate on the ” dehumanisation ” of the’Urban man – the city-dweller. It also attracts the attention of two psychologists from Columbia University (New York), John Darley (who died in 2018) and Bibb Latané, who wonder more prosaically if a large number of witnesses promotes a “dilution of responsibility”.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers invite volunteers into their lab under various pretexts, their real intention being to expose them to an emergency situation. In a variation of the experiment, a participant appears to have an epileptic seizure. In another, smoke seeps under the door as the guinea pigs fill out a questionnaire. The young psychologists note that the number of individuals present, which varies from one to five, is inversely correlated to the probability of an intervention. In the smoke scenario, for example, 55% of single subjects raise the alarm within the first two minutes, compared to 12% of groups of three. In groups of four, it takes four minutes to reach 12% reporting (at this point, 38% of groups of three and 75% of single subjects have come forward). If accomplices of the experimenter slip into the group to play apathy, the reactivity of the real participants collapses even more.
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