Disturbing History - The Bystander Effect

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

On March 27, 1964, The New York Times published a story that would become one of the most famous examples of human indifference ever told. According to the report, 38 people in Queens watched as 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stalked and attacked for more than half an hour, and not one of them called police or came to help.The story spread across the country and eventually helped inspire decades of research into what became known as the bystander effect. But much of the story was wrong.In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian goes back to the night of March 13, 1964, and separates the legend from what the evidence actually shows.Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old bar manager living in Kew Gardens with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko. She was attacked outside her apartment building, but the idea that dozens of people simply watched and did nothing does not match the record. One neighbor shouted and frightened the attacker away. Another, Sophia Farrar, went downstairs, found Kitty, and stayed with her until the ambulance arrived.So where did the number 38 come from? How many people actually witnessed the attack? And how did a complicated crime become a lasting story about an uncaring crowd?The episode also explores the psychology that grew out of the case, including John Darley and Bibb Latané’s famous seizure and smoke-filled-room experiments, diffusion of responsibility, audience inhibition, and the tendency to look to other people before deciding whether something is really an emergency. Then the science takes another turn.Later studies found that the bystander effect is far from universal. In real emergencies, people often do help. A major 2019 study of 219 public conflicts caught on security cameras found that someone intervened in roughly nine out of ten incidents. So why do some crowds freeze while others act?This episode examines the history, the science, and the myth surrounding Kitty Genovese—and what decades of research really tell us about how ordinary people behave when someone needs help.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew.

And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.

History isn't just written by the victors. Victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. Somebody goes down in a train station at rush hour, and for a second or two, the whole platform looks like somebody hit pause. The people closest to him stop where they are. A few of them stare. A man farther back gets his phone out, and nobody around him can tell if that phone is calling for help or taking a video. People look at the man on the floor, and then they look at each other, and then they look at the man again, and nobody has taken a step. That pause usually lasts a few seconds. Sometimes it lasts a good deal longer.

I spent 16 years in law enforcement, most of it in and around Atlanta, and I've walked up on that ring of people more times than I could count. There's somebody in the middle of it, and there's a circle of folks standing exactly where they stopped. And when you ask them what happened, most of them will tell you they were about to do something. Most of them mean it. They're not cold people. The ones who are standing there and the ones who are down on their knees look exactly alike, walking through the station a minute earlier, and whatever separates them

happened in the few seconds after the man hit the floor. And it happened fast enough that most of them couldn't tell you what it was. Disturbing history is about the version of the past that got taught, and the version that actually happened, and the gap between the two. Most episodes find that gap in a place, a case, a company, a government report. This one finds it in a psychology textbook. For 50 years, the first thing a college freshman learned about how people behave in a crowd was that 38 people watched Kitty Genevese die and did nothing. That sentence went into sermons and speeches and dozens of editions of introductory psychology. It shaped how a generation of Americans thought about cities, about strangers, and about themselves. And it was built on a

newspaper story that got the number wrong, got the watching wrong, and got the nobody wrong, and nobody checked it for 40 years. That's the show. A story that was more useful than the truth and stayed in circulation because it was useful. The second reason it belongs here is Kitty herself. She was 28. She managed a bar.

She drove a red fiat. And she lived above a shop in Queens with a woman she loved. And none of that survived the retelling. The legend needed a victim and got one. And the person disappeared under it. The woman who actually went to her, Sophia Farrar was left out of the story for most of her life. Restoring people the record erased is something this show does every time it can.

The third reason is what the research found once it stopped relying on the legend. The experiments are real. Ordinary people sat in a room filling with smoke because two strangers next to them didn't react. Ordinary people listened to a man choke on an intercom and stayed in their chairs because they thought somebody else was listening to. Those results are more unsettling than the myth, because they don't let anybody off. The 38 witnesses were supposed to be other people. The students in those rooms were everybody, and the last reason is the turn at the end.

When researchers finally went and looked at real violence on real cameras, in three countries, people stepped in nine times out of ten. The story we were told about ourselves for half a century was worse than the truth, and the correction is as much a part of the history as the mistake. That's the shape of a disturbing history episode. A famous story, a real person under it, the record that shows the story was wrong, and what's left standing once it's gone. So that's the question for tonight, whether a person who watches another human being desperately need help would actually do something about it. Almost everybody says yes, and they say it fast. The research on that question goes back more than 60 years, and for most of Most of that time the answer it gave back was not a comfortable one.

Then, in the last 10 years or so, it took a turn that almost nobody saw coming. And it looks like people help a lot more than we've been told. Psychologists have a name for what happens on that platform. They call it the bystander effect. The short version of it is a paradox, that sometimes the more people there are who could help, the less any one of them feels like it's on them to do it. Anybody who's heard of the bystander effect has heard where it came from. In March of 1964, a young woman was murdered outside her apartment in Queens, New York.

And two weeks later, the New York Times reported that 38 of her neighbors had watched it happen, and not one of them had done a thing. That story went across the country in a matter of days. Preachers used it, and politicians used it, and it went into the psychology textbooks and stayed there for 50 years. And it's the reason two young researchers in New York sat down and built the experiments we're going to spend the middle of this episode on. The story wasn't true.

The number was wrong, and most of what got built on top of the number was wrong along with it. Catherine Susan Genevise was born in Brooklyn on the 7th of July, 1935, the oldest of five in an Italian-American family. Her father, Vincent, ran a coat and apron supply business, and her mother, Rachel, kept the house. Everybody called the oldest girl, Kitty, and by every account that survives, she was. was the loud one. She went to Prospect Heights High School and graduated in 1953, and the yearbook that year voted her class cut up. In 1954, her mother witnessed a shooting on a Brooklyn street, and the family packed up and moved out to New Canaan, Connecticut. Kitty was 19, and she stayed in New York. She got married that same year, but the marriage ended in annulment within months.

She did clerical work for a while and then went into bartending, which suited her a whole lot better. And by 1963, she was managing a bar called Ev's 11th Hour on Jamaica Avenue in Hollis Queens. She worked nights. She drove a bright red fiat. And she was putting money back because she wanted to open an Italian restaurant of her own one day. In 1963, she met a woman named Mary Anzolonko in a bar in Greenwich Village, and before long, the two of them had moved in together. The apartment was on the second floor above a row of shops on Austin Street and Kew Gardens. at 8270 Austin. The shops faced the street.

The doors to the apartments upstairs were around back, off a little alley, at the bottom of stairwells that the street couldn't see. Marianne said later that Kitty was the outgoing one, and she was the quiet one, and they'd been together about a year. After the murder, Marianne was the first person the police looked at. Detectives kept her for hours that morning as a possible suspect,

until the arrest took her out of it, and she said the officers seemed about as interested in what she and Kitty were to each other, as in anything she could tell them about the night. She kept quiet about all of it for 40 years. Q Gardens in 1964 was about as far from the picture of a dangerous New York neighborhood as you could get. It was middle class and quiet, with Tudor-style buildings and trees and a Long Island Railroad station that sent people into Manhattan every morning. Across Austin Street from Kitty's building, there was a big apartment house,

called the Mowbray. People who lived there thought of it as a safe place, and by the standards of the city, it was. Almost none of that has been part of the story. Kitty went into the textbooks as the woman nobody helped, and Kitty herself dropped out of them. A historian named Marcia Gallo wrote a book about that in 2015 called No One Helped, and the thread that runs through the whole thing is how completely the legend swallowed the person. The early coverage called Mary Ann, her roommate. The relationship got left out of most retellings for decades, and Mary Ann didn't talk about it in public until a radio interview in 2004. Gallo's argument is that America in 1964 needed a symbol more than it needed a woman. On the night of the 12th of March, 1964,

Kitty closed up the bar in Hollis and drove home, and somebody followed her. She pulled into the parking lot at the Q Gardens train station a little after three in the morning on Friday the 13th of March. The lot was about 100 feet from her door. The man behind her was Winston Mosley. He was 29 years old, and he lived in South Ozone Park in a house he owned, with a wife and children, and he ran business machines for a living, and he had no record of any kind. What he told the police later was that he'd gone out that night looking for a woman to kill, and he'd spotted Kitty's car and followed it home. She got out and started walking. He got out and came after her on foot.

What she saw or heard isn't in the record, but she changed direction and headed toward Leffert's Boulevard, and he caught her in front of the shops on Austin Street and stabbed her twice in the back with a hunting knife. She screamed. The line reported at the time was that she cried out that she'd been stabbed and called for help. Lights came on in the Mowbray.

A man named Robert Moser opened a window on an upper floor and hollered down at Mosley to leave that girl alone. And Mosley walked away from her. He went back to his car, moved it to a different spot, and sat there. He told the police later, he figured the man would shut his window and go back to bed. Kitty got up off the sidewalk. She was bleeding from two wounds in her back and she made it around the corner of the building toward the rear doors.

And she got into the vestibule at 8262 Austin Street, which is a little entryway at the bottom of a staircase. and she went down there on the floor. It was out of sight of the street. It was out of sight of the Mowbray. Almost nobody in that neighborhood could have seen into it if they'd tried. About ten minutes after the first attack,

Mosley came back. He'd put on a different hat. He went along the back of the building trying doors until he found her, and he stabbed her several more times, and he raped her as she lay in that stairwell, and he took about $49 out of her wallet, and then he left.

One person saw part of that. A man named Carl Ross lived at the top of the stairs above the vestibule, and he opened his door, and he saw Mosley bent over Kitty, and he shut the door. By the accounts that came out later, he phoned a friend to ask what he ought to do, and then he crawled across a roof to a neighbor's apartment, and from there the police finally got called. Ross is the man behind a line the New York Times printed two weeks later without a name on it. He said he didn't want to get involved.

somebody else did get involved, and her name was Sophia Farrar. She was a neighbor. She knew Kitty, and she got a phone call from another neighbor who'd heard the noise. And she went down to that vestibule and found Kitty on the floor and stayed with her. She held her until help came. She did that without any way of knowing whether the man with the knife was still in the building. The police logged the call at about 10 minutes to four. A car was there inside a couple of minutes and an ambulance right behind it. and Kitty Genevese died on the way to Queens General Hospital. She was 28. From the first stab wound to the phone call was somewhere around 35 minutes.

Six days later, on the 18th of March, a man in Corona Queens looked out his window in the middle of the afternoon and saw a stranger carrying a television set out of a neighbor's house, and he called the police, and another neighbor went out and disabled the stranger's car so he couldn't drive off. The stranger was Winston Mosley. He was arrested for burglary, and while they had him, he confessed to Kitty Genovese, and then to two other killings, and he knew things about the Genevese attack that hadn't been in the papers.

He was tried that June. The jury convicted him on the 11th, and the judge sentenced him to death, and in 1967, the New York Court of Appeals knocked that down to life, on the grounds that the trial court had wrongly kept out evidence about his mental state. In 1968, he escaped during a medical transport in Buffalo and took hostages and raped a woman before they got him back. He earned a college degree in prison. He wrote a piece for the New York Times in 1977, saying he'd been rehabilitated. He was turned down for parole every time he came up for it, and he died at the Clinton Correctional facility in Danamora on the 28th of March, 2016, at 81. The story that followed Kitty Genevese was never really about the man who killed.

The Times ran its first story on the murder on the 14th of March, four paragraphs inside the paper, and it read like every other stabbing the city produced that year. About 10 days later, the paper's Metropolitan Editor, a man named Abe Rosenthal, had lunch with police commissioner Michael Murphy. Rosenthal wrote afterward that he'd asked about a different case entirely, and Murphy brought up the one in Queens on his own. And what Murphy said was that 38 people had watched a one,

woman get killed, and not one of them had called the police. Rosenthal sent a reporter named Martin Gonsberg out to Q Gardens. The story ran on the 27th of March, 1964. The headline said 37 people saw a murder and didn't call the police, and the first sentence said 38, and 38 is the number that stuck. It called those people respectable law-abiding citizens. It said they'd watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks over more than half an hour and that not one of them had called during the assault. It quoted neighbors,

mostly without names. One of them said he didn't want to get involved. One said they'd thought it was a lover's quarrel. A woman said she'd been tired and gone back to bed. Almost everything in that opening was wrong. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The spring of 1964 was a good time to tell America that city people had quit caring about each other. was up and the cities were changing fast. And there was a running worry in the culture about big city anonymity, about neighbors who didn't know each other's names, about modern life turning everybody into a stranger.

The Genevieve's story looked like proof of all of it, on the front of the most respected newspaper in the country. 38 ordinary people had looked out at a dying woman and gone back to sleep. It went everywhere inside a week. Life magazine ran a column on it, and papers all over the country reprinted it and rewrote it, and preachers built sermons on it, and it got argued about in Washington.

Rosenthal wrote a short book that same year and called it 38 witnesses. People started saying Genevesey syndrome when they meant a crowd watching a crime and doing nothing. Phil Oaks wrote a song about it in 1967. It turned up in short stories and on television for 30 years after that. Anytime a writer needed a stand in for a city that didn't care, And within a few years, it was in the psychology textbooks, usually as one paragraph at the top of the chapter on social influence. And it stayed there addition after addition. When a team of psychologists went looking in 2007, they pulled a stack of introductory social psychology textbooks

off the shelf, and the story was in every one of them, told the way the times told it. 40 years after the fact, the 38 witnesses were still the first thing a college freshman learned about how people act in groups. Rosenthal never backed away from it. He died in 2006, and when the paper's own writer came to him in 2004 with the problems in the story, he said the exact number had never been the point.

He'd said the same thing in his book 40 years earlier, that 38, or some smaller number, the lesson stood. The trouble is, the lesson was the number. Take out the 38 and what you've got left is a handful of confused people at three in the morning. and that's not a story that crosses the country. Marcia Gallo makes one more point about the timing, which is that the story landed in the middle of an argument in New York about crime and policing,

and who was to blame for all of it, and a tale about 38 in different citizens was useful to the people who wanted to say the problem with the city, was the people living in it. The witnesses got as famous as the victim. Nobody knew their names, and everybody knew what they'd done. And by the time anybody got around to checking whether they'd actually done, it. The story had been the truth for 40 years. The first people who could have checked were the prosecutors, and their numbers never matched the papers. Charles Scholar was the assistant district

attorney who tried Mosley. He said years later that his office went through the neighborhood and came up with about half a dozen people who'd seen or heard anything they could use in court. The trial in June of 64 called a handful of neighbors and was built on the confession, and nobody at the time went back to the times and asked where the other 32 were. Where the number came from has never been settled. It came out of Commissioner Murphy's mouth at lunch. Some of the later writers think it might have been the number of people the police canvassed, or the number of names on a detective's list, and nobody has ever produced a list of 38 witnesses, because as far as anybody's been able to find, there never was one. The story started

coming apart in public in 2004. A lawyer named Joseph DeMay Jr., who lived in Kew Gardens and cared about its history, went back through the trial record and the coverage and the actual layout of Austin Street and put what he found online. That February, a writer named Jim Risenberger published a long piece in the Times, the same paper, laying out the problems. In 2007-3, British psychologists Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, published a paper in American Psychologist, which is the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, that went through the story claim by claim. Two books came out in 2014, one by Kevin Cook, and one by Catherine Pellanero. Marcia Gallo's history came in 2015, and so did a documentary

called The Witness, made with Kitty's younger brother Bill. And in 2016, in its own obituary for Winston Mosley, the New York Times wrote that it's story from 1964 had grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they'd perceived. There's no evidence that 38 people witnessed the murder. There's no evidence 38 people witnessed anything at all. The word watched doesn't hold up. Some residents heard something, and some of them saw pieces of the first attack from across the street or from upstairs windows, and several of them said they thought they were hearing a couple fighting, or a drunk, or a bar argument that had spilled out onto the sidewalk. Robert Moser clearly understood something was wrong, and his shout drove

Mosley off. The number of people who could have seen the second attack, the one that killed her, is close to zero because it happened in a stairwell entry around the back of the building that no window on the street looked into. The claim that nobody called is simply not true. Carl Ross called the police, a man named Michael Hoffman, who was 15 in 1964, and lived in the Marlborough. has said for years that his father called the police after the first attack, and the call went nowhere. There's no police record of it, and the way the department kept records in 1964, there's no way to prove it, or disprove it now. At least one other resident is quoted in the later book saying she called and was told they already had it. Those are memories, decades old,

and they can't be verified, and they can't be waived off either. The claim that nobody helped is just false. Sophia Farrar went to her and stayed until the ambulance and police arrived. And then there's the geography. The original story had three attacks over half an hour with people watching the whole time from their windows. The three came from early police statements and the later reconstruction, built partly on Mosley's own account, settled on two, and the second one was out of sight of nearly everybody. Manning, Levine, and Collins put it in one sentence in 2007. The evidence doesn't support any of the three central claims of the legend,

38 witnesses, that they watched, or that they all did nothing. So the event that gave the bystander effect its name is one of the clearest cases anybody has of a story outrunning the facts and holding the lead for 40 years. That doesn't make the bystander effect a myth. Two psychologists in New York read that time story in 1964 and decided to test the question in a room where nobody's memory and nobody's newspaper could get in the way. And what they found was disturbing enough without any help from Q Gardens.

John Darley was a young social psychologist at New York University, and Bib Litani was a young social psychologist at Columbia. And in the spring of 64, they were reading the same paper as everybody else. Latani has said the two of them started working it out over dinner, not long after the story ran. What set them apart was the question they asked. Everybody else was asking why people had been so cruel. The sermons were about apathy and the death of conscience in the big city. They didn't think the neighbors on Austin Street were unusual people at all.

Their hunch was that they were ordinary and that something about the situation itself and specifically about having other people around had changed how each one of them processed what was happening and what they felt they owed it. The idea at the center of that is what they call diffusion of responsibility. A person alone with an emergency is carrying the whole thing. Nobody else is there, and whatever happens next is on that one person. And that's a heavy thing to feel. Put nine more people in the room and the same weight gets divided nine more ways. So everybody's holding a tenth of it.

And a tenth of a responsibility is an easy thing to set down, especially if there's any reason to think one of the other nine is better place to pick it up. Their guess was that the 38 witnesses, if there'd been 38, would each have been thinking a version of the same thought. Somebody's called by now. Somebody closer is handling it. There are lights on all over that building, and one of those people has to be on the phone already. In 1964, that was a guess, so they built a way to test it. The first experiment ran at New York University, and Darley and Latani published it in 1968.

The people who showed up were students who thought they'd signed up for a study on the personal problems of adjusting to college in a big city. Each one got put alone in a small room with a microphone and a set of headphones, and the story they were told was that because talking about personal problems face-to-face can be embarrassing. The discussion would happen over an intercom. Each person would talk for about two minutes, and while one person talked to everybody else's microphone would be off, and the experimenter wouldn't be listening. It would just be students,

talking to each other through a wall. None of that was true. Every voice on that intercom except the participant's own was a recording, and the participant was the only real person in the building who wasn't running the study. Early on, one of the recorded voices, a young man mentioned that he was prone to seizures,

especially under stress or when he was studying hard. The conversation moved along. Then on his second turn, he started having one. His speech got louder and started to break up, and he said he needed help, that he was having a real problem right now, and if somebody could help him out, it'd be good. And the words came apart into stammering,

and then there were choking sounds, and then the microphone went quiet. The whole thing ran about two minutes. The question was how long it took the real person in the next room to get up and go find somebody. The one thing they changed from person, person to person was how many others the participant believed were on the line. Some thought it was just the two of them, themselves and the man having the seizure. Some thought there were three people on the line,

and some thought there were six. When people thought they were the only one who could hear him, 85% went for help before the seizure ended, and they went fast. It took about 52 seconds on average, when they thought one other person could hear. Sixty-two percent went before it ended, when they thought four other people could hear. 31% went for help. And the ones who went took almost three minutes to do it. By the time the experimenters ended the session a few minutes later, every single person who thought they were alone with him had reported it.

And among the ones who thought there were four other listeners. More than a third never reported it at all. Nobody in that building had to face down an attacker. Nobody had to risk getting stabbed. All they had to do was stand up and open a door. and tell a graduate student that the guy on the intercom sounded like he was choking, and whether they did that, and how fast, depended on how many other people they believed were sitting in identical little rooms down the hall.

Darley and Latine had everybody fill out personality tests, too, because they were looking for the kind of person who helps and the kind who doesn't. They measured authoritarianism and need for approval and how cynical people were about other people's motives, and none of it predicted a thing. Male or female didn't predict anything either. The only thing in the building that moved the numbers was how many others the participant thought were listening. The people who didn't report the seizure weren't calm.

When the experimenter finally opened the door, they were sweating and shaking and asking whether the man was all right. They hadn't decided he didn't need help. They hadn't decided anything. They were still sitting there, not having decided when the door opened. Darley and Latiney called it indecision and conflict. and they were clear that these people were not apathetic. That's the closest thing to a picture of the Austin Street neighbors any laboratory has ever produced.

And it looks a lot more like being stuck than like not caring. The second experiment ran at Columbia. Participants came into a small waiting room and got handed a questionnaire about life in the city. And while they sat there filling it out, smoke started coming in through a vent in the wall. It was harmless, and it kept coming. And within a few minutes, there was enough of it in the room

that it was hard to see across and hard to breathe comfortably. When a person was alone in that room, three out of four of them got up and went to report it, and half of them did it inside two minutes. Then Latene and Darley changed one thing. They put two other people in the room, and those two worked for the study, and their instructions were to notice the smoke,

glance at it, shrug it off, and go back to the questionnaire, not say anything, not do anything. With two calm strangers sitting there, One participant in 10 reported the smoke. The other nine sat in a room filling up with smoke, coughing and rubbing their eyes and waving it out of their faces, and kept on riding.

They ran it one more way, with three real participants and no plans, three people, any one of whom could have gotten up, and in those rooms somebody reported the smoke inside six minutes, about 38% of the time. In most of them, nobody did. afterward they asked the people who'd stayed put what they thought the smoke was and the answers were inventive steam some of them said something off the air conditioning smog drifting in from outside a couple of people

decided it was some kind of truth gas being pumped in to make them answer the questionnaire honestly what almost none of them said was that they'd been scared and hadn't wanted to be the one to react because that's not what it felt like from the inside from the inside it felt like from the inside it felt like the smoke probably wasn't a problem, because look at everybody else. The name for that is pluralistic ignorance, and it's the second mechanism Latinay and Darley found, separate from diffusion of responsibility. Everybody in the room privately thinks something might be wrong. Everybody in the room also wants to see how everybody else is taking it before they commit to anything. So everybody looks around, and what they see is a room full of people who look calm, because every one of those

people is doing the same thing, holding a straight face while they check the room. Each person takes the other people's calm as information, and each person concludes that nobody else is worried. So there's probably nothing to worry about. The room is full of worried people, and every one of them is hiding it. And what all that hiding adds up to is a calm that nobody in the room actually feels. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. That's what Robert Moser broke when he yelled out his window. He was the one person on Austin Street who acted on what he privately thought, instead of waiting to see what the building thought, and it worked for about 10 minutes. Latene and Darley put their work together in a book in 1970 called The Unresponsive

Bystander, and the piece of it that's lasted longest is a model of what has to happen inside a person's head between seeing something and doing something about it. There are five steps, and a bystander has to get through every one of them. The first is just noticing, and that sounds too obvious to count, but a lot of emergencies never get past it. People walking through a city are distracted by traffic and noise and their own problems, and now, by the phone in their hand, and a man slumped against a wall is background,

until something forces him into the foreground. In 1973, Darley and a colleague named Daniel Bats and tested that one in a study that's famous on its own. They recruited students at Princeton Theological Seminary and told them to walk across campus to give a short talk. And along the route they planted a man slumped in a doorway, groaning and coughing. Half the students had been told to talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Some had been told they were running late. Of the ones in a hurry, about 10% stopped.

Of the ones with time to spare, 63% stopped. What the talk was about made no measurable difference, and several, of the students on their way to speak about the Good Samaritan stepped over the man in the doorway to get there. The second step is deciding it's an emergency. And this is where most of the damage gets done, because most real emergencies are ambiguous when they start. A couple yelling on a sidewalk might be a fight or might be an assault. A man on the ground might be drunk or might be dying. A scream at three in the morning might be a woman getting stabbed or might be a bar argument, which is what several people on Austin Street decided it was.

The seizure study and the smoke room both live right here. In both of them, having other people around changed how the situation got processed. The third step is accepting that it's on this person, specifically, and not somebody else. Somebody should help as a thought nearly everybody has. The question is, whether somebody means me. This is where diffusion of responsibility does its work, and it's the step Kitty's neighbors have been accused of failing for 60 years. The fourth step is knowing what to do.

A person who's noticed decided it's real and accepted that it's on them can still stall right here because the options aren't always obvious. Call for help, but who? Go over there and then what? Try to break it up or go find security or go find somebody who knows first aid. In 1964 in New York, there was no 911 to call. That number didn't exist anywhere in the country until 1968, when the first call went through in a little town called Haleyville, Alabama. Calling the police in Kew Gardens meant finding a number or getting the operator and asking to be connected,

and then explaining to a desk officer at a precinct what was going on and where. The Genevieve's case gets cited as one of the things that pushed the country toward a single emergency number, and New York City got its 911 in the summer of 1968. The fifth step is doing it. Even somebody who's cleared the other four can freeze on the last one, and the reasons are mostly fear. Fear of getting hurt, fear of making it worse, fear of legal trouble, and fear of being wrong in front of a crowd.

Every one of those five steps is a place where other people can push a person toward doing nothing. That's the whole architecture of the thing, and it's why a crowded room can be a worse place to have a heart attack than an empty hallway. Latene and Darley called the fear of being wrong in front of, front of a crowd audience inhibition, and I think it's the one people are least willing to admit to. The mechanics of it are simple. A person yells for somebody to call an ambulance, and it turns out the man on the ground was asleep, and now they've made a scene over nothing and everybody in earshot is looking at them. People are extraordinarily sensitive to that. Embarrassment is a small thing

next to a stranger's life, but in the moment, with the outcome uncertain, the embarrassment is guaranteed and the emergency is only possible. And people weigh those two things fast, without quite knowing they're doing it. And a lot of them come down on the side of not being the one who overreacted. Ambiguity feeds it. The clearer in emergency is, the smaller the risk of looking foolish, and the easier it gets to move. A building on fire is obvious, and a stabbing in plain view is obvious. And a person sitting very still on a bench with their head down is not, and neither is a scream from a street where the bars close at three in the morning. In the smoke room, the people who stayed in their chairs weren't refusing to help anybody. They were refusing to be the first one in

the room to say out loud that something was wrong in front of two people who seemed sure it wasn't. That's a different thing, and it's a much more common one. In 1969, Latine ran another study with a colleague named Judith Rodin. Male students were brought into a room to fill out forms for what they were told was a consumer research company. A woman who said she was the company's representative got them set up and then went into an office next door, behind a curtain. And a few minutes later, from behind that curtain, came the sound of her climbing onto a chair, and then a crash, and then a scream, and then her voice saying her foot was caught and she couldn't move it, and she thought her ankle was hurt. It was a recording, and the question was who came through the curtain.

When a man was alone in the room, 70% went to check on her. When a man was sitting next to someone in on the experiment, who'd been told to ignore the whole thing. Only 7% went to see what was happening behind the curtain. When two strangers were sitting together, both of them part of the experiment. At least one of them went to help her in about 40% of the pairs. Then they tried pairs of friends, two people who'd come in together and knew each other. and in those pairs, one of them went to help 70% of the time, the same as a man sitting alone.

Groups can shut helping down, and the passive plant cut it to almost nothing, but not all groups are the same group. Two strangers can't read each other, so each one takes the other's stillness as a signal, and two friends can read each other fine. They can trade a look or say something, or one of them can just get up without worrying too much about what the other one thinks. The men who didn't go said afterward that they hadn't been sure what happened or hadn't wanted to embarrass her. And strangers and friends gave the same reasons.

The difference was that friends talked to each other, and strangers didn't. A psychologist named Mark Levine ran a version of the same idea in 2005. His team recruited Manchester United supporters in England and had them walk across a campus to another building. And on the way, a jogger fell down in front of them and grabbed his ankle. Sometimes the jogger had a Manchester United shirt on. Sometimes he had on the shirt of Liverpool, which is the club Manchester United fans hate most. In the home colors, the supporters stopped for him almost every time.

In the Liverpool shirt, most of them walked on by. Then they did it again, only this time they got the same kind of supporters thinking of themselves as football fans in general instead of fans of one club. And the Liverpool runner started getting help too. Most of this plays out on the street, and once the five steps are in your head, it's hard to walk through a city without seeing them.

A man's lying on a sidewalk in the afternoon. He might be sleeping. He might be drunk. He might be homeless and resting. Or he might be having a stroke, and people slow down going past him and speed back up. A car goes off the road at an intersection, and half a dozen drivers stop and get out and stand in a loose ring around it. And every one of them is waiting to see whether somebody, with more training than they've got is going to step forward.

A woman's crying on a train. A man and a woman are having it out on a corner, and he's got her by the arm. A little kid is standing alone in a store, looking around with no adult anywhere in sight. A young man at a concert is so drunk he can't stand up, and his friends are laughing at him. In every one of those, the person watching runs a fast check,

mostly below the level of thinking about it. Whether that person is really in trouble, whether they're dangerous, whether somebody's already called, whether walking over will make it worse, whether the watcher is remotely qualified to do anything, and whether it's any of their business. Sixteen years in law enforcement, and the thing in this research that surprised me least,

is how much of the delay comes from people not knowing what's actually happening. A domestic call that comes in as somebody screaming can be a woman getting beaten, or two roommates fighting about the rent, and the person who heard it through a, a wall has no way to know which. Dispatchers are trained to pull specifics out of callers for exactly that reason, because the

first thing out of a witness's mouth is usually a guess. What did you see? Not what do you think happened? What did you see? How many people? Is anybody down? Is there a weapon? Every one of those questions is there because the caller usually started with something like, I think somebody's in trouble. And I think is where the delay lives. The bystander research just measured in a controlled room, how much that guess gets shaped by the guesses of everybody standing nearby. Most of the time the problem is that people don't know what they're looking at, and the not knowing gives every other mechanism room to work. The experiments were run in the 1960s, when the only thing a witness could do with their hands was pick up a phone and dial,

and nobody who built them was thinking about a crowd where every hand is already holding a camera. The version of this that shows up now is somebody getting a tactic. in public and 20 phones coming up. The videos online within the hour, sometimes before the ambulance leaves, and the argument that follows every one of those videos is about whether the people holding the phones should have been doing something else. The reasons people film aren't all the same, and most of them aren't shameful. Some people film because they've been told their whole lives that video is how a crime

gets proven, and they're right about that. Some are documenting for the police, or for a lawsuit or because they're afraid of what the police response is going to look like without it some are in shock and the phone is what their hands do some are keeping their distance because the thing looks dangerous and the phone gives them a way to be there without getting close some are sure somebody else in the crowd has already called and some are filming because a video like that gets attention and attention is worth something to them there's no honest way to sort those people from the outside a person recording and assault can be on the phone with a dispatcher at the same time, and often is.

A 17-year-old girl in Minneapolis in May of 2020 filmed a police officer kneeling on a man's neck for more than nine minutes, and her video became the center of a murder conviction and earned her a special citation from the Pulitzer Board the next year. Filming can be the most useful thing a person does. The question is, when documenting replaces helping instead of going alongside it, a A crowd of witnesses is one thing. A crowd of witnesses where nobody has stepped forward because all of them are recording as an audience. And the difference between the two is whether anybody in that crowd is still holding the responsibility.

Or whether every one of them has set it down to hold the phone. That line between a witness and an audience is the part of this I keep going back to. And I don't think the psychology of 1968 has an answer for it yet. The internet is a crowd too. And it's a whole lot bigger than any room, Lateney and dark. ever built. The bystander effect online isn't the same thing as the one in the lab. The lab version is about people who can hear or see an emergency and could physically go do something about it. The online version is about people who read a post or watch a stream or see a message in a group

and could, in theory, contact somebody who could help. And those aren't the same situation. And the research on the second one is a lot thinner. What's there points the same direction. In 2000, a psychologist named Patrick Markey ran a study in internet chat rooms. He had a helper go into rooms of different sizes and ask a simple question anybody could answer about how to look at somebody's profile. And the bigger the room, the longer it took for anybody to answer. Then he ran it again with the helper addressing one specific person in the room by name. And with a name on the request, room size stopped mattering.

The help came fast. What the internet adds is scale and distance. Somebody posts that they're in danger or that they're thinking about hurting themselves, and thousands of people see it, and every one of those thousands has good reason to think somebody closer, or somebody with more information, or somebody who actually knows this person, is already on it. Harassment plays out in front of huge silent crowds. A threat gets seen by 100,000 accounts and reported by a handful. and the online version has a mechanism the lab never had,

which is that sharing something feels like doing something. Reposting a plea for help is an action. It just isn't the action of calling somebody who can send a car. So the online crowd can amplify every one of Latene and Darley's mechanisms, the diffusion, and the ambiguity and reading everybody else's silence as information, while handing people a way to feel involved without being responsible. I'd stop short of calling it the same effect. It's a cousin, and it's a big one.

In 1969, a year after the seizure study, a team led by Irving Pili-Avon took the question out of the lab and put it on the New York City subway. A member of the team would ride a car between stations and partway through the ride he'd collapse and lie on the floor. And sometimes he had a cane, and sometimes he smelled like liquor, and had a bottle in a paper bag.

And the rest of the team sat nearby and watched what the other riders did. They had a plan for what to do if nobody moved. One of them was assigned to step in after a set amount of time and play the helper, so the study could see whether one person moving got others to follow. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. On most rides, they never got the chance. Somebody else beat them to it. The man with the cane got help in 95% of the trials, usually inside a few seconds, and more often than not for more than one ride. The drunk got help about half the time, which is still a lot more than the lab would have predicted. And how many people were in the car made no difference to how fast somebody moved.

There was no bystander effect on the subway. Pili Avon's team figured it was because the situation wasn't ambiguous, and nobody could leave. So the cost of doing nothing kept climbing until somebody paid it. Then in 2011, a team led by Peter Fisher published a big meta-analysis in psychological bulletin. They pulled together more than 100 separate results from more than 50 studies, over 7,700 participants in all, and asked what the whole body of work said. The bystander effect was real. Across the literature, people were measurably less likely to help with other people around.

But the effect got weaker and in some conditions went away entirely, in exactly the situations where the stakes were highest. When the emergency was dangerous, when there was a purpose of the purpose of the problem, arbitrators standing right there, and when bystanders could help with their hands instead of just calling somebody, other people held helping back much less, and in the most dangerous cases, hardly at all. The reason lines up with the five steps. Danger takes the ambiguity out. A man holding a knife over a woman on a sidewalk isn't a lover's quarrel and doesn't need interpreting, and somebody screaming for help is an emergency by definition. So the second step, the one where most of the delay

lies, gets cleared on the spot, and the third step gets easier too, because there's no comfortable story where this is somebody else's problem. And in a dangerous situation, other people offer something the lab couldn't measure, which is backup. One person going at an attacker is taking a real risk. Three people together are in theory, taking a lot less risk. In the smoke room, the other people were the reason nobody moved. On a street with a man holding a knife, the other people are the reason somebody can. In 2019, a team led by Richard Philpott, and including Mark Levine, the same Levine who helped take the Genevieve's story apart in 2007,

published a paper in American psychologist that wasn't built on students in a room. It was built on real violence in real cities. They gathered security camera footage of 219 public conflicts, arguments and assaults that had happened in front of cameras in three places. Amsterdam and the Netherlands, Lancaster in England, and Cape Town in South Africa. And then they went through every recording frame by frame and wrote down what every visible bystander did. In about nine out of ten of those conflicts, at least one bystander stepped in,

and usually more than one did. On average, close to four separate people intervened in some way in each one, whether that was pulling somebody back getting between the two parties, calming somebody down or helping the victim afterward. That held in all three cities, including Cape Town, which has one of the highest violent crime rates of any city in the world. As the number of bystanders at a conflict went up, the chance that somebody would step in went up with it.

That isn't a contradiction of Darley and Ladenei, and the researchers were careful about why. There are two questions hiding inside the phrase bystander effect. one is about any particular person, whether this one individual is less likely to act with other people around, and the lab says yes, and the meta-analysis says yes, with the exceptions we just went through. The other question is about the person on the ground, whether a victim is more or less likely to get help from anybody when the crowd is bigger, and the cameras say more likely, and it isn't hard to see why. If each person in a group of 10 is a little less likely to act than they'd be alone,

But there are ten of them instead of one. The odds that at least one of them moves can still come out higher, because more people means more chances. For 50 years, the sentence that went with the bystander effect was that crowds don't help. That sentence came from a newspaper story about a crime that didn't happen the way the newspaper said. What 219 cameras in three countries say is that crowds help all the time, and that the person in trouble is better off with a crowd around than without one.

I think that study ought to be as famous as the seizure experiment, and it isn't. The reason a crowd helps, when it helps, is the same reason it freezes when it freezes. Social influence runs both directions. In the smoke room, the participant looked at two calm people and decided there was no fire, and the calm spread from them, to him. But the mechanism that spread the calm doesn't care what it spreads. If one of those two plants had stood up and said the smoke looked wrong and gone for the door, The participant would almost certainly have followed.

Pluralistic ignorance breaks. The second one person makes their private thoughts public. That's what happens in a real crowd when it goes right. One person moves toward the man on the tile, and that's the signal. A second person sees the first one kneel, and now this is an emergency, because somebody has treated it like one. Somebody says they're calling for an ambulance, and now everybody knows that jobs taken,

so the next person doesn't have to wonder about it and can do something else. Somebody asks if anybody knows chest compressions. And a nurse, three people back, who'd been standing there wondering whether it was her place, steps forward, because now it's clearly her place. Somebody asks where the nearest defibrillator is, and somebody stops traffic and somebody keeps the crowd back. None of those people were cruel while they were standing still,

and none of them turned brave when they moved. What changed was the room. Inaction spreads through a crowd because people read each other, and so does action. A person who needs help in a crowd is better off not yelling for somebody to help them, because somebody is the word that lets everybody off. The advice that comes straight out of the diffusion research and out of Markey's chat rooms is to pick a person and say it to them. The man in the gray jacket, call an ambulance, the woman by the door, go get security.

Once it's got a name on it, the responsibility can't spread out, because it's been handed to one person in front of everybody. A person who sees an emergency can do the same thing from the other side by saying out loud what's happening. That man just collapsed. I'm calling for help. Does anybody here know first aid? Every one of those sentences is a public read of the situation, which is the thing pluralistic ignorance can't survive, and every one of them makes it cheaper for the next person to move. and helping doesn't have to mean getting between somebody in a knife. Most of the ways to help are quieter than that.

Call. Find a security guard or somebody who works there. Get medical help coming. Stay with the person afterwards so they aren't alone. Most of the bystander training programs in use today are built on a short list along those lines. And every item on it is something an ordinary person can do without being a hero or a fighter. The fourth step, knowing what to do, is the one that can be fixed ahead of time. Somebody who's taken a first aid class, or a chest compression class, or who's just looked up where the defibrillator hangs in the building where they work, has already cleared a step that stops a lot of people cold.

Knowing what to do doesn't make anybody braver. It just takes one of the reasons to stand still off the table before the day it matters. Every state in the country has some form of good Samaritan protection for people who try in good faith to help in an emergency. The details vary, and I'm not a lawyer, but the fear of getting sued for trying to help is mostly bigger than the actual risk. Kitty Genevese has been the woman nobody helped for 62 years. She was a bar manager from Brooklyn who wanted to open a restaurant of her own someday. She lived above a shop in a quiet neighborhood with a woman she loved, and who came home from work at three in the morning and was

murdered by a stranger who'd gone out that night looking for somebody to kill. The rest got built on top of her afterward by people who never met her. The myth lasted as long as it did because it was clean. 38 people watched. Nobody helped. The city had lost its soul. That fits in one sentence and it fits on the first page of a textbook chapter and it makes a point a lot of people in 1964 already wanted made. The true version doesn't fit anywhere neatly. Some people, heard something and didn't understand what it was. Some saw a piece of the first attack and yelled, and the yelling worked for a while. Some thought help had already been called and may have been right. One man saw the killing up close and shut his door, and then called the police anyway.

And one woman, whose name almost nobody outside Queens knew until a documentary in 2015, came down the stairs and held Kitty Genevese while she died. Sophia Farrar lived in Kew Gardens, the rest of her life. She died in 2020 at 92, and for most of the 56 years between that night and her death, what she'd done wasn't part of the story at all. The psychology has caught up faster than the culture has. Manning, Levine, and Collins argued in 2007 that the field ought to quit teaching the Genevieve's story as history and start teaching it as what it is, which is a parable, and a lot of the textbooks have quietly done that sense. The experiments stand on their own, Diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance and the five steps are all real,

and none of it needed 38 witnesses to be true, and the 38 witnesses never needed to exist for any of it to matter. Her brother Bill Genevieve joined the Marines in 1966, and he said the story of nobody helping his sister was part of why he went. He lost both legs in Vietnam the next year. Around the 50th anniversary, he went back through every piece of it, the witnesses who were still alive and the reporters who wrote it and the people who'd corrected it. And the film that came out of that is where most of the country first heard Sophia Farrar's name. She's in it. She tells it herself, sitting in Kew Gardens, more than 50 years after she went down those stairs. The man in the train station is still on the tile. The people around him are still standing there,

and for a few seconds every one of them is running the same questions. Whether this is real, whether somebody else here knows what to do, whether somebody's already called and whether it's their place. Everything in 60 years of research says that pause is a room full of people who each privately think something's wrong and are each waiting for the room to confirm it, and then somebody takes a step, and the room confirms it, and the crowd turns into a rescue.

The disturbing part of the bystander effect is that ordinary decent people can be held in place for a long time by uncertainty and by each, other. The cameras in Amsterdam and Lancaster and Cape Town say the hold breaks a lot more often than it doesn't, and the person who breaks it is usually just whoever happened to move first. Somebody on Austin Street did move first, about three in the morning on the 13th of March, 1964. He yelled out a window and the man with the knife walked away for 10 minutes. Then a woman named Sophia Farrar moved down a staircase toward a sound she couldn't place, into an entryway where the killer might still have been standing.

Neither one of them is in the 38. Neither one of them was ever supposed to be. If you've got a story of your own, a time you were in that ring of people and moved or didn't, I'd like to hear it. Send it to me at Brian, B-R-I-A-N, at paranormal world productions.com. First name only is fine.

No name at all is fine. And if you got something out of this one, pass it along. Tell somebody who thinks they already know the Kitty Genevieve's story. That's how this show gets around. One person handing it to the next.