[FRIAM] Kitty Genovese

Fri May 25 19:14:43 EDT 2007

here is the straight poop from my colleague Jim Laird.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com)
Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Jim Laird 
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net
Sent: 5/25/2007 4:02:13 PM 
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|theDaily Mail

Sure, by all means.  (You always did know how to influence me.)

James D. Laird
Professor of Psychology
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610
Tel: 508-793-7272
FAX: 508-793-7265

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2007 5:27 PM
To: Jim Laird
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|theDaily Mail

May I have your permission to forward this to the list?  Exactly what I was hoping for.  

Nick 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Jim Laird 
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net
Sent: 5/25/2007 3:17:27 PM 
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|theDaily Mail

Nick,
            There is a great book on this phenomenon, called I think The unresponsive bystander. By Bib Latane and John Darley.  From the 70s I would guess.  Of course, an actual, real life emergency is likely to be multiply determined and complex.  But L & Ds pitch was that there were at least two factors at work in the Kitty Genovese case. One was that many of the bystanders were aware that other people had also seen the event, and so assumed that others would have called 911 already.  To test this possibility, in a variety of situations, they led people to believe that someone was hurt, or having a seizure, or otherwise in trouble, and that there were either no other potential helpers, 1 other, or 4 or 5 others. (Of course, the potential helpers were confederates, or sometimes nothing more than a tape recorder, but the real participants didnt know that.)  When the real participant was the only potential helper, 100% helped.  When there was 1 other, most but not all people helped, and when there were 4 or 5 others, even fewer of the real participants helped.  L & D had lots of observations to support the view that the nonhelpers believed the emergency was real, and were concerned. They just didnt help. L & D called it diffusion of responsibility, I think.
            They also observed that emergencies are by their nature often ambiguous, so that people may relay on others to decide if there is a problem. One of their very cute studies of this aspect involved sitting real participants down with a bunch of questionnaires, on a high floor in a Manhattan building.  While they worked on the questionnaires, smoke began to billow from the ventilation ducts.  They observed that when people were alone, they noticed the smoke quickly, and immediately went to tell someone about it.  When in groups, of either confederates or other real participants, they were slower to notice the smoke, and when they did, appeared to check their neighbors, who were industriously working on the questionnaires , so they in effect shrugged and went back to their own questionnaires.  The mere presence of others dramatically reduced noticing an emergency, and dealing with it.  
            In the Milgram studies, the participants did not just assume a Yale professor wouldnt really hurt someone.  To test this, Milgrim ran one study in a sleazy motel in Bridgeport.  Obedience dropper from 65% to something like 40%, but that is still pretty appalling.  In other variations, participants were required to give electric shocks to a cute puppywho yelped and leaped when they did so, but they did it.  In others, they hurt themselves, by for instance giving themselves blasts of  white noise which was actually harmless, but which they were told would damage their hearing.  Or eat disgustingly bitter quinine soaked crackers.  
            Hope this is helpful.  I couldnt gather what the discussion was about.
            And I certainly hope we are still colleagues.  You just live farther away.
            Jim

James D. Laird
Professor of Psychology
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610
Tel: 508-793-7272
FAX: 508-793-7265

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2007 2:44 AM
To: Bill Eldridge; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Cc: jlaird at clarku.edu
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|theDaily Mail

Bill, thanks for your many clarifications.  

I apologize for my crappy memory.

Two weeks ago, we were sitting around a family party chatting and watching two little kids roughhousing.  They were behaving just on the edge of dangerous, and any one of the adults in the room would have been seen as authorized by the others to rein them in, including two parents, two grandparents  of the younger child, one parent and various aunts and uncles of the older child.  In a millisecond, the older child was down with a badly broken upper arm.  Required pins, surgery, the whole nine yards.  

There was not an adult in that room who did not report that she or he would have stopped the kids long before if other adults had not been there.  This was not said in an exculpatory way by anybody.  Nobody took blame in this case as a zero sum game.  We we did seem to feel, rightly or wrongly, that social groups have a certain viscosity that we felt restrained within a membrane of group inaction.  

Nick 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Bill Eldridge 
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Cc: jlaird at clarku.edu
Sent: 5/25/2007 4:15:32 AM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|theDaily Mail

The link I sent with this notes that of the 38 people who saw Kitty "get clobbered"
only a couple would have seen an actual knife or had an idea that she was in real danger
or seen anything (and many of the tenants were old and would have had a tough time
figuring out what was happening when they'd just been waken at 3am, the streetlight
was dim, etc.)

Most just heard a noise in front of a usually noisy bar (this night it closed early after a fight),
some saw a woman get up off the ground and walk away (if slowly), perhaps a few
actually saw the man by her before he ran away and she got up and walked away.
She apparently yelled something one time, didn't keep screaming. (Of course if she
was in bad shape she quite likely couldn't have kept screaming but she did walk away).
One who realized she was in danger said she called the police, but in those pre-911
days lots of calls were lost and callers were regular ly abused for annoying the police
with non-serious matters (you had to identify yourself to report a crime back then).
One observer called the police but got scared to speak and hung up. Another was
very very drunk and didn't want to deal with the police. For those that didn't realize
it was a knife stabbing, they would have reported an assault, which would have brought
out the police in about an hour, too late to help Kitty.

When the murderer did come back and find Kitty, it was behind the building next door,
not the same apartment building. The link also notes that a lot of the "witnesses" were old
people who wouldn't have seen or heard well, and would have been in no position for
heroics, only to call the police. But for most, the incident ended when they were woken
up by a yell, they looked to the window, they saw a woman get up and walk away.
In short, a ty pical non-event in noisy tumultous New York.

Of course the NY Times pre sented this very differently, and thus the hyper-example
of citizen apathy. But I also think of cases like these in the middle of civilization and
heavy news coverage, and can only imagine how distorted our reporting of events
in the Middle East, Asia or Africa is.

[Not long ago I read someone's evaluation of the Third Wave anecdote from the
Whole Earth Catalog. In this case it turns out that it wasn't nearly the big to-do
that the teacher made it out to be, but the teacher basically made a career out of
repeating this "informative lesson" of how Nazism could have started, even sucking
in Stewart Brand. The more important lesson there being, "How could this bogus version
of events stick around for so long without anyone questioning it as obvious bullshit?"
Which poss ibly relates back to the original thread - in my school we didn't study the
holocaust even though I read "Rise & Fall..." for summer reading - perhaps the
schools actua lly thought there were lots of other topics they could teach well,
rather than simply caving to possible concerns about Moslem students as the paper
asserts.]

Nicholas Thompson wrote: 
Bill, 

I still think the two are related.  The people who watched kitty genovese get clobbered assumed a social fabric in which women dont get beaten to death under their windows and didnt think it their particular responsibility to try to save her life.   The milgrim subjects assumed that the world was not the sort of place where experimenters allow participants to actually torture one another.  And, in fact, they were right.  Well, in that particular instance.  

My former colleague, James Laird, who does research about this sort of stuff, thinks I am a real bonehead about it, so you neednt take my views too seriously. 

Nick 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Bill Eldridge 
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Cc: Carl Tollander
Sent: 5/24/2007 8:48:16 PM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|the Daily Mail

Nicholas Thompson wrote: 
Carl, 

I am trying to get my Psych 101 in order:  Was the kitty genovese incident
the one that led to that horrendous series of experiments that demonstrate
that if 
 you give people a shock console (or what they THINK is a shock
console) and ask them politely to do so, they will cheerfully use shocks
that they think are lethal, just so long as they are told to?  

Unfortunately not - it's about how neighbors ignore horrible things going on in their insular world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese

What it really might represent is how facts are distorted to make events look worse than they
are, especially when a newspaper's involved:

http://www.oldkewgardens.com/ss-nytimes-3.html

I use to live across from a bar, and one night I saw two guys squaring off on a sidewalk and
a third come from behind and break a bottle over one's head. I was on the phone to 911 in
a flash, and by the time I'd quickly described the scene unfolding to the dispatcher, the 3 of them
were giving each other hugs and going arm-in-arm back into the bar to drink some more.

In a similarly bad neighborhood where I flipped my bike and broke my collarbone, I was
staggering around in a great deal of pain, but got a car to stop (cautiously) late at night in just a few minutes,
and they were a great help in getting me to a hospital. Good Samaritans still exist.

I'm intrigued by one line in the article, "But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades
at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged
what was taught in some local mosques." It makes it sound like there's a good balanced way of explaining
the Crusades as anything but a good deal of Euro-thuggery intent on dealing a good come-uppance to
the well-entrenched local population some thousands of miles away. Would make for good entertainment
to hear this rationale at least.

Personally, I think most grade school teachers are better off trying to teach simpler, les s contentious topics
well (even if ignoring whether Columbus was actual ly Catalonian and other possibly interesting side issues)
instead of being too focused on fuzzy goals of teaching tolerance and sensitivity, as if there were much
of that in history.

Regarding humor and genocide, I think of the Nazis as a pretty humorless, mystical bunch.
Somehow it didn't seem to deter them from genocide.

reminds me of the stoners that jg showed us at arrowhead, who would run out
from the crowd, throw a stone, and then sink back into the anonymity of the
crowd. 

Thought experiment:  if all humor were forbidden, would genocide be
possible???  In the Pleistocene context, with many small groups in
desperate conflict for unpredictable resources, what was humor FOR?  

N

[Original Message]
From: Carl Tollander <carl at plektyx.com>
To: <nickthompson at earthlink.net>; <wedtech at redfish.com>
Date: 5/24/2007 2:52:28 PM
Subject: Re: [WedTech] Teachers drop the Ho
 locaust to avoid

offending   Muslims|the Daily Mail

Nick asks:
  >Do we need a science of Comparative Genocideology?

Closest I've seen that starts to address this is Chapter 15 from Philip 
Bobbit's book "The Shield of Achilles"
titled "The Kitty Genovese Incident and the War in Bosnia".  I'll bring 
it by FRIAM.

C.

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