Instructons: Read the following summary and answer the questions

afterward.

In March of 1964, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed repeated and raped as she
returned home from work to her New York City apartment at 3 a.m. The attack lasted for 30
minutes, during which time her screams and pleas for help were supposedly heard by no less
than 38 of her neighbors. Yet no one did anything to help her, and by the time someone called
the police, she had died. The incident drew international shock and outrage over “bystander
apathy” and people’s refusal to get involved. NOTE: Details of this story have been disputed
(Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007); however, this incident subsequently inspired a great deal of
research and resulted in the formation of one of Social Psychology’s most enduring theories, the
Theory of Social Impact.

Following this incident, two New York social psychologists named John Darley and Bibb Latane
met for dinner to discuss how this could’ve happened. They really didn’t believe that apathy was
the reason behind all 38 people refusing to help. They thought it was something else instead.
As social psychologists, they knew that the environment could be a powerful influence on
people’s behavior, even though they may not know it. They noted that the neighbors could see
that other people had turned on their lights and were looking out the window. Each person
could’ve assumed that someone else was helping. Darley and Latane thought that the presence
of multiple bystanders could produce a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility, which is a
psychological state in which each person feels decreased personal responsibility for intervening.
To test their explanation, they performed several experiments that have become classics in social
psychology. Their diffusion of responsibility idea was the hypothesis that they were testing.

To do this, they created an “emergency situation” in a lab. The participants were undergraduates
who were told that they would be meeting to discuss “personal problems faced by normal college
students.” They were informed that to insure privacy, they would be seated in separate rooms,
communicate through an intercom system, and the experimenter would not listen to their
conversation. Participants would take turns speaking for several rounds. In each round, a
participant would have two minutes to speak, during which time the others would be unable to
interrupt or be heard, because their microphones would be turned off.

As the discussion began over the intercom, a speaker described his difficulties adjusting to
college life and disclosed that he suffered from seizures. During the next round of conversation,
the same speaker started to gasp and stammer, “Could somebody er-er- help (choking sounds)…
I’m gonna die-er-er—I’m gonna die—help—seizure (chokes, then silence).

The real participants didn’t know it, but they were actually listening to a tape recording. This
ensured that they were all exposed to the identical “emergency.” To test how the number of
bystanders influence helping, Darley and Latane manipulated the number of other people that
each participant believed to be present and listening over the intercom. On a random basis, some
participants were told they were alone with the victim; in a second condition, they were told
there was one other person present; in a third condition, they were told there were four other
listeners present. All of the participants believed the seizure was real and serious. But did they
help?

When Darley and Latane analyzed the data, they found that 80% of the people who thought they
were alone with the victim helped within the first minute of the seizure, and 100% helped within
3 minutes. As the number of presumed bystanders increased, the proportion who helped
decreased, and those who did help took longer to respond. In short, their results demonstrated
support for their diffusion of responsibility hypothesis, and it has been replicated over and over
again in different settings. Now the diffusion of responsibility has become the Theory of Social
Impact, which has been used to explain a variety of human social behaviors. It was a major
contribution to the field of social psychology, and it was all based on that one incident, albeit
misreported in 1964, involving the unfortunate Kitty Genovese.

Questions

1. What was the IV in this study?

Answer: Number of people thought to be present in the room by the participants during the
experiment.

2. What was the DV?

Answer: Number of people who helped the victim and the time in which it took them to.

3. What was the hypothesis?

Answer: Diffusion of responsibility.

4. Did the study meet the criteria for an experiment? Explain your reasoning.

Answer: Yes, because it follows the basic guidelines of a true experiment. These guidelines
are: a manipulated variable and a dependent, both a control and experimental group, random
assignment, and control over extraneous variables.