[FRIAM] Kitty Genovese
Carl Tollander
carl at plektyx.com
Fri May 25 19:47:36 EDT 2007
Yah, Latane and Darley is/are the main reference for the Bobbit chapter....
C.
Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> 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
> <mailto:nick at redfish.com>)
> Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University
> (nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>)
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Jim Laird <mailto:jlaird at clarku.edu>
> *To: *nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto: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 <mailto:jlaird at clarku.edu>
>
> * To: * nickthompson at earthlink.net
> <mailto: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 <mailto:dcbill at volny.cz>
>
> * To: * nickthompson at earthlink.net
> <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>;The Friday Morning
> Applied Complexity Coffee Group <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>
> * Cc: * jlaird at clarku.edu <mailto: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 <mailto:dcbill at volny.cz>
>
> * To: * nickthompson at earthlink.net
> <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>;The Friday Morning
> Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>
> * Cc: * Carl Tollander <mailto:carl at plektyx.com>
>
> * 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> <mailto:carl at plektyx.com>
>> To: <nickthompson at earthlink.net> <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>; <wedtech at redfish.com> <mailto: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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> ============================================================
>
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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