The Death Of Kitty Genovese

At times the other participant would plead for the experiment to stop. The effect the administrator had on each subject was tremendous. Among many others, some factors that affected the participant’s obedience included the appearance of the instructor, directions provided, and the setting of the experiment at a prestigious university. The instructor made the participants believe that they were obligated to continue administering shocks through his words, appearance and tone of voice.

In this particular research there was two experiments performed and investigated for the results of how a person reacts in the state of an emergency to help another; also to see whether the certainty or uncertainty takes place. The center question of this article is why do bystanders ignore the cry for help? This question matters because they are many case studies done and proves that they are some bystanders who are willing to help the victim in need and others just ignore the cry. One of the main findings done by the authors was that there were several researches done on this certain topic finding that certain people faces and emergency and it was more likely that an individual would help a victim in need if they were alone then in a crowd. The authors of this particular finding are Darley and Latane. The hypothesis that Latane and Darley’s made was that in a state of an emergencies are more

In the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, twenty-eight year old barmaid Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was murdered and raped on the street in Kew Gardens, New York. The incident did not initially receive much attention until Martin Gansberg's infamous article, "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder, Didn't Call the Police", was published in the New York Times two weeks later. In reality, only twelve people witnessed the event yet each did nothing to significantly help Genovese until it was too late. The Genovese murder has become the definitive example of the "bystander effect", the social phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to help someone in distress if there are other people present. The bystander effect occurs wherever there is

1. After the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, John Darley and Bibb Latane were in shock as the rest of the city/world that a 28 year old lady could be stabbed in a neighborhood with about 38 by standers or more and say or do nothing. Why didn’t anyone try and help her? How could people stand by and watch this go on? People speculated that the failure of people to get involved might be due more to the influence (socially) that bystanders have on each other. To test this theory, Darley and Latane, two psychologists, decided to conduct a study. “Diffusion of Responsibility” Everyone hopes that someone else will be the first to step up

The memoir Brain on Fire, written by author Susannah Cahalan, describes the journey she lived through with an undiagnosed disease. Susannah goes from being a New York Times journalist to being a person who couldn’t control herself and had to be strapped down to the hospital bed, in other words she was becoming psychotic. She did not choose to become the person she was in the hospital, someone who had no control over her body, someone who was lost. This got to a the point to where nurses no longer wanted to treat her and lost their patience because she was not being cooperative and was becoming more violent.The reason as to why she became this person was due to the misdiagnosing, doctors not taking time to do further test and family not thinking her symptoms were serious enough to have an actual disease. The signs were there but no one thought anything about it, as they thought she was over exaggerating. It wasn’t until she had her first seizure and the fact that she was hospitalized that her family, friends and even the doctors finally realized there was something wrong.

Why did nobody call for help or get involved? Should people be held accountable for not reporting or helping others in an emergency? Should these people go to prison or pay a fine for not assisting someone in distress? Lastly, should we pass a good samaritan law in the state of California? In order to make a decision, we must first understand why people don’t do anything in an emergency; in addition to what the law is, what it does, and its purpose.

Seizure is the physical finding that occurs after abnormal electrical activities in the brain. Patients with seizures could have symptoms like changes in one’s behavior, drooling, frothing at the mouth, irregular eye movement, grunting and snorting, incontinence, extreme changes in mood, shakes, sudden falls, abnormal changes in taste buds, clenching teeth, respiratory arrest, uncontrolled muscle spasms, twitching, and brief blackout follow by period of confusion where they don’t remember anything (Seizures: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia). Seizures also have many underlying etiology such as abnormal sodium or glucose levels in the blood, brain infections, brain injuries, brain tumor,

Anna Fadiman book focusses on this Lee family who gave birth to their fourteenth child named Lia who suffered from seizure soon after birth. The family was finding it difficult to believe that their child was sick. Their American doctor’s name Dan was very involved in their family as the primary doctor even though the family did not give him full cooperation in helping treating their daughter. As it is noted in Anne Fadiman’s book, “Dan had no way of knowing that Foua and Nao Kao had already diagnosed their daughter's problem as the illness where the spirit catches you, and you fall down. Foua and Nao Kao had no way of knowing that Dan had diagnosed it as epilepsy, the most common of all neurological disorders. Each had accurately noted the same symptoms, but Dan would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by soul loss, and Lia's parents would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by an electrochemical storm inside their daughter's head that had been stirred up by the misfiring of aberrant brain cells”(Anne Fadiman, p. 28). Lee’s

Introduction. On January 06, 2005, a cargo train carrying a massive amount of chlorine gas spilled in Graniteville, South Carolina, creating panic and indeed chaos to both citizens and emergency personnel’s. The residents were caught in their sleep when freight train 192 traveling approximately 47 mph struck and leaked a dangerous amount of chlorine gas into the atmosphere. As a result of this tragedy, 5,400 individuals were evacuated from their homes and nine victims later died of gas related causes. The magnitude of this disaster was one that would change any town or city forever. And such sentiments were felt throughout the community of Graniteville. However, the purpose of this paper is to discuss what was learned from this unanticipated train calamity in Graniteville. While exploring how the field of emergency management can properly respond to unforeseen transportation accidents through implementing efficient and effective ways of communication in the midst of an incident.

Kitty Genovese’s murder and trial have had a lasting impact on many areas of life. One example, is in entertainment. A multitudinous number of books, shows, articles, and songs have been made to reflect on the 38 supposed witnesses (“Revised”). In academic writing alone, over 1,000 pieces have stemmed from Kitty’s story (Takooshian). The 911 line was created as a result of this tragedy as well (Merry). Before this incident, the most reliable method to call police in New York was to use the specific precinct number (Lemann). Moreover, a fair amount of police believed that it was their responsibility to fight crimes while the citizens wait for them (“What”). Multiple accounts reveal that the dispatcher would tell callers to mind their business

What would you do, if a mother was crying for your help? Some people would say, “I would help,” but may act differently in a crisis. Such as one of the tragedies brought by Hurricane Sandy. During the hurricane, a mother named Glenda Moore tried to escape the storm with her two boys before it was too late. During their desperate attempt to escape the storm, their car was trapped and they were seperated. Ms. Moore desperately beg neighbors to come to her need but were ignored, pushed aside, and not acknowledged. As a result, the two boys- Brandon, 2, and Connor 4, were later found cold, stiff, and lifeless. Could their effort have saved the boys? We will never know, but there could have been a chance that their life would not have ended so tragically and unexpectedly.

My article was Darley’s and Latane’s, “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility.” They conducted this study to figure out how would people react in various group sizes in an emergency situation. As well as which one those individuals in different size groups would go and call for help. The concept of this was taken from the famous case of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death multiple times and finally was killed in her own neighborhood and no one intervened. This is known to be the bystander effect. However, in this research experiment, people were either in groups of 2, 3, or 6 and then they would overhear the person having an epileptic seizure. It was predicted that due to the presence of

There were 84 participants in experiment 1 raging from ages 52 to 84, they were recruited through newspaper, porters, and libraries. These participants were then divided into two groups (middle-aged and older adults). In the middle-aged group there were 30 females and 10 males and in the older adults group there were 21 female and 23 males. In experiment 2, there were 71 participants, 30 young adults, 19 older adults, and 22 AD patients. They were between the ages of 17 and 90 and were separated into three groups. The young adults group had 21 females and 9 males, the older adults have 11 females and 8 males, and the AD patients had 16 females and 6 males. The participants went through different types of tests during the study and they were given a certain time to complete them. The researchers collected their data by given the participants a series of questions asking them to writing down certain things that they remembered about the information they had previously given the

The students were then divided into three different experimental conditions. The participants in group 1 believed they would only be talking to one other person; participants in group 2 thought they were talking to two others and those in group 3 were told that they would be talking to five other people. In actuality, the subjects were alone and the voices were on tape (Darley and Latane, 1968). Darley and Latane then decided that most people would interpret a realistic epileptic seizure as an emergency. As the discussions began, the participants heard from the first “student,” a male, who had trouble concentrating on his studies and sometimes, suffered severe seizures. Then the conversations were switched, in group 1 it was the participants turn while in the other two groups the participants heard from other students before it was their turn. The emergency occurred when the first student spoke again. The first student spoke normally, but then began to have a seizure (Darley and Latane, 1968). Darley and Latane measured the percentage of subjects in each group who left their cubicle to help the student in trouble. They also measured how long it took participants to respond to the emergency. The participants were given four minutes to act, before the experiment was ended (Darley and Latane, 1968).

The participants could not talk during the whole testing due to distractions. Anything that could distract the participants could cause an effect on the study. Because of that certain rules had to be taken, everybody in the room had to stay quiet for a valid result. In the study the participants had to get their guardian or parent to sign a consent form. The participants were aware of everything that was going to happen throughout the study. No participants were harmed in any of the trial, but if they wanted to withdraw from the experiment they