Home » Society Crime » Murder Crime » Genovese Catherine Kitty Murder » The Kitty Genovese Die The Kitty Genovese Die in Crimes Prevention & Resource Directory

As a copywriter, Ive studied the mechanisms of how and why people are persuaded to take action, especially in the marketplace. My clients, most of whom are business owners, hire me to create a piece of writing that will convince their customers to trade hardearned cash for a particular product or service.As any savvy marketer knows, one of the most relevant and useful principles for understanding human behavior is social proof. Social proof simply means that people often take their cues from others when deciding what to think or how to behave in a given situation, especially when they are unsure about what to think or do.It would be tempting to dismiss social proof as mindless, herdlike behavior. But the fact is, everybody relies on it to some degree. It can provide valuable direction and knowledge when we do not have the time or the resources to discover how we should act.Suppose a fire alarm goes off in your workplace without warning. Chances are, you will observe the actions of the people around you before you decide whether you should leave. If you dont smell smoke and nobody is yelling fire or rushing out the door, if there is no crowd gathering in the street, you probably assume it is a false alarm and wait for the maintenance man to shut it off. I know I have done this many times. This is a form of social proof. You take your cues from behavior of others to learn what you should do in that situation.In the marketplace, social proof is a common way for people to make quick decisions about whether to buy something. For example, many people do not have time to browse through hundreds of books, so they choose one from the bestseller list. They figure that if millions of other people thought a particular book was good, it must be good. Other people do not have time or energy to find out which is the best fax machine or VCR, so they buy whatever model is the hottest seller. A group of tourists walking down a busy street does not know which restaurant has the best food, so they wait in line at the most crowded one they find, thinking that if so many other people are willing to wait, it must be something special. Social proof provides a shortcut to knowledge that guides our actions.But social proof is not foolproof. Sometimes it can lead people astray, and with grave consequences. This is probably what happened to the bystanders in the Kitty Genovese incident. I wish I could claim credit for this insight, but the credit goes to two New Yorkbased psychology professors, Bibb Latané and John Darley, who first hit on the idea in the late 1960s. A summary of their findings, with plenty of enlightening commentary, can be found in a fascinating book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by psychologist Robert Cialdini New York: William Morrow, 1993. Cialdini explains Latané and Darleys thesis that it was precisely because there were so many witnesses that Genovese received no help. Here is how Cialdini summarizes it:

 

Address: 1001 Connecticut Avenue, Suite 425, Washington, D.C. 20036
Telephone: (202-296-7263)6
Fax: 202-296-0771
Website: http://www.objectivistcenter.org/navigator/articles/nav+csilk_why-kitty-genovese-die.asp