The Kitty Genovese Story in Introductory Psychology Textbooks

Abstract

Given the many inaccuracies in the original New York Times 38-witnesses version of the Kitty Genovese story, this study examined the accuracy of this story in current introductory psychology textbooks, 50 years later. Recent studies have shown that there is no evidence for the following three key features of the original story: (1) that 38 witnesses were present, (2) that these witnesses watched the attack for its duration from their apartment windows, and (3) that the witnesses remained inactive, not intervening until it was too late. Twenty-one introductory textbooks were analyzed for the accuracy of their coverage of the Kitty Genovese story. Although a few texts still tell the inaccurate 38-witnesses story, most of the texts provide more accurate, updated coverage.

Keywords

Kitty Genovese introductory textbooks introductory psychology

Kitty Genovese was sexually assaulted and murdered 50 years ago on March 13, 1964, in the early hours of the morning at about 3:15 am. The story of how 38 witnesses watched for more than a half an hour from their apartment windows but failed to intervene until it was too late while 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was brutally attacked on the street below has taken on iconic status in introductory psychology textbooks. As Jarrett (2008) pointed out, this story has served textbook authors well by allowing them to link experimental research (bystander nonintervention in this case) with the real world in an engaging way. According to Manning, Levine, and Collins (2007), the story of the 38 witnesses almost from its inception became a modern parable—the antonym of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable of the 38 witnesses demonstrated how others can overwhelm an individual’s will to help their neighbor. Hence, although the Good Samaritan was venerated, the 38 witnesses were maligned.

Manning et al. (2007) noted that the story of the 38 witnesses was originally developed by two journalists, Martin Gansberg and A. M. Rosenthal. About 2 weeks after Genovese’s murder, Gansberg (1964) wrote the first version of the story of the 38 witnesses for the New York Times. It appeared on p. 1 with the headline, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police.”¹ The story began “For more than an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens…Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead” (p. 1). Later that year, A. M. Rosenthal, the New York Times metropolitan editor who had edited Gansberg’s article, developed the story into a short book, Thirty Eight Witnesses (1964/1999). This story so shook the nation that it inspired more research on bystander apathy than on the Holocaust during the next 20 years (Levitt & Dubner, 2009). In psychology, it not only served as motivation for John Darley and Bibb Latané’s landmark research program on bystander intervention (e.g., Latané & Darley, 1970) but also became the standard way for textbook authors to introduce this line of research.

Recent research, however, has shown that the story of the 38 witnesses is just that, a story (Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007). Using archival materials and some earlier articles on inaccuracies in the 38 witnesses version of the Kitty Genovese story (e.g., De May, 2006; Rasenberger, 2004, 2006), Manning et al. showed that there was no evidence for the three key features of story—that 38 witnesses were present, that these witnesses watched the attack for its duration from their apartment windows, and that the witnesses remained inactive and did not intervene until it was too late. In brief, the evidence suggests that there were far fewer than 38 eyewitnesses, probably only a half dozen or so at most; that possibly more residents heard something but the perceptions of all of the witnesses to the initial attack were brief and inchoate; that the initial attack that occurred where more residents might have seen or heard it only lasted a few minutes and that the second more prolonged attack occurred out of view and earshot of nearly all of the residents except one that saw it but chose to ignore it; that some residents clearly intervened leading the attacker to abandon the first attack; and that at least one person actually called the police after the first attack. With respect to this earlier police call, there was no 911 system in 1964, and calls from this area were not always welcomed by the police because of a bar there that had a reputation for trouble.² Hence, it appears that the police did not respond to this call. Finally, contrary to the original story, Kitty was still alive when the police finally did arrive in response to a later call but died soon thereafter. In sum, the story of the 38 witnesses as it has usually been told in textbooks is more myth than fact.

Manning et al. (2007) examined the coverage of the Kitty Genovese story in 10 popular social psychology textbooks (published before their article, with copyright dates ranging from 1995 to 2005). The story appeared in all of the texts, and in all cases it was essentially the original New York Times story of the 38 witnesses. This finding leads to the question, Does it matter that textbook accounts of the Kitty Genovese story are not rooted in reality because all of the inaccuracies that have been identified do not change the impact of the original story?³ The answer is yes. According to Morawski (1992), textbooks are the key transmitters of psychological knowledge both to potential new members of the discipline and to those outside the discipline (giving psychology away per George Miller’s 1969 admonishment), and therefore it is essential that textbook information be accurate. Thus, it is important to the psychological teaching community that we identify inaccuracies in our textbooks so that they can be corrected and that we as teachers do not continue to “give away” false information about our discipline. The obvious downside of inaccuracies in the story of the 38 witnesses is that students will be misled into accepting the story as fact, and sadly, it seems that students seldom question the textbook stories that they are told (Burton, 2011).

Because textbooks play such a central role in our students’ education and because introductory psychology is the most popular course in psychology with an estimated annual enrollment in the United States of 1.2–1.6 million students (Steuer & Ham, 2008) and may be the only psychology course taken by most of these students, psychology teachers should want introductory textbooks to be as accurate as possible. This study took a step in this direction by examining the accuracy of the story of Kitty Genovese as told in current introductory psychology textbooks. Given that the Manning et al. article was published in 2007, sufficient time has elapsed for the authors of current textbooks to have revised their versions of the Kitty Genovese story in accordance with the findings of Manning et al. (2007) and other articles critical of the 38-witnesses version of the Kitty Genovese story.

Method

The textbook sample was a large convenience sample that included the current editions of 21 introductory psychology textbooks. The most recent copyright dates of 19 of these texts were 2012–2014, the current 3-year revision cycle for introductory textbooks at the time of this study. Two texts with a 2015 copyright date were included in the sample because they were already published and available in early 2014, when this study was conducted. Complete reference information for all 21 texts is given in the References section.

To determine where the coverage of the Kitty Genovese story was located within each text, I checked the subject index and the name index for “Kitty Genovese” and “Catherine Genovese” or variants of these two entries, such as “K. Genovese.” If no index entry was found, then I checked the chapter on social psychology page-by-page for the story in case there had been an indexing error. Once located, the accuracy of the coverage was assessed by noting (a) how many of the three key inaccurate features of the original story identified by Manning et al. (2007) were corrected and (b) the presence of any other noteworthy inaccuracies, such as that Kitty was attacked 3 times instead of 2. I also checked for citations of Manning et al. (2007) and any other articles critical of the original story of the 38 witnesses. If any of these articles were cited, I noted the nature of their coverage.

Results and Discussion

Four (19%) of the 21 textbooks did not cover the Kitty Genovese story and five (29%) of the 17 texts that covered the story did not cite Manning et al. (2007) or any other article critical of the original story. Of the 12 texts citing a critical article, 8 cited Manning et al. (2007), 1 cited Manning et al. (2007) and Manning, Levine, and Collins (2008), 1 cited Rasenberger (2006), 1 cited De May (2006), and 1 cited an interview with Joseph De May at www.onthemedia.org.2009.

Three of the five texts that did not cite a critical article told the original version of the story, but one of these texts said that there were “numerous” witnesses instead of specifying 38. The other two texts included a qualification to the story but did not provide a reference for it. One text qualified 38 as the number of witnesses by saying “though that number was later contested,” and the other text included a qualification about the second attack, “evidence suggests that the second attack occurred inside her building, where few people could have witnessed it.” Of the 12 texts citing a critical article, one cited Manning et al. (2007) but not as a reference critical of the original version of the story but rather as a reference for that version of the story. Three of other 11 texts covered criticism of all three key features of the original story, three covered two key features, and three covered only one key feature (the disputed number of witnesses in all three cases). The remaining two texts did not specifically criticize any of the key features but rather provided an inclusive error statement for the original story reports. One of these two texts stated that “these reports turned out to be erroneous” and the other stated that the “these reports were not confirmed by later court testimony in the case.” In addition, 2 of the 12 texts that cited a critical article incorrectly claimed that that Kitty was attacked 3 times, but the fact that there were only two attacks and not three was corrected a long time ago in later New York Times articles (e.g., Dowd, 1984).

In sum, it appears that (a) the vast majority of introductory psychology textbook authors still include the Kitty Genovese story over 50 years later and (b) most of these texts at least include some discussion of recent criticisms of the original version of the story. Only 3 (18%) of the 17 texts that included coverage of the story presented the original story with no corrections or qualifications to it. The positive nature of these findings for introductory psychology textbooks can also be seen when these results are contrasted with some recent findings for coverage of the Kitty Genovese story in introductory social psychology textbooks. Griggs and Whitehead (2014) examined such coverage in 10 current introductory social psychology textbooks. All 10 textbooks provided coverage of the Kitty Genovese story, but 5 texts (50%, compared to 18% in this study) did not cite Manning et al. (2007) or any of the other critical articles or qualify the story in some way. In addition, three of the five social psychology texts that cited the Manning et al.’s article did so in a rather perfunctory manner in one sentence, somewhat defusing its importance (e.g., “Although some of the facts have been disputed,…”), and one of the two remaining texts provided a paragraph describing Manning et al.’s criticisms but separated the Kitty Genovese story and the Manning et al. coverage with about five pages of text, thereby lessening its impact on the Genovese storyline. Thus, counterintuitively, introductory psychology textbook authors seem to be doing a better job than introductory social psychology authors in providing an accurate version of the Kitty Genovese story. This anomalous finding is especially puzzling given that introductory psychology authors have to cover the entirety of social psychology in one chapter whereas social psychology authors have an entire text to do so. Hence, social psychology authors have more space than introductory psychology authors for each topic within the field and thus more space in which to cover the criticisms of the original Kitty Genovese story, but they do not seem to be doing so. Why this is the case is not evident, but it is worth noting that this counterintuitive finding is consistent with Griggs and Whitehead’s (2014) congruous finding that more coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment and its criticisms is provided in introductory psychology textbooks than in introductory social psychology textbooks.

Although there is definitely room for coverage improvement in introductory psychology textbooks (especially those that still tell the original 38-witnesses story), the present findings indicated that most introductory textbook authors have done a fairly good job of revising the accuracy of their coverage of the Kitty Genovese story. Hopefully, this article will lead the authors of introductory psychology texts and introductory social psychology texts to assess and revise their coverage of the Kitty Genovese story in accordance with Manning et al. (2007) and other articles critical of the original version of the story. I realize that space is at a premium in textbooks, especially introductory textbooks, but revision of the Kitty Genovese story for accuracy can be accomplished in a few sentences. Hence, the accuracy/space trade-off in this case should be an acceptable one for text authors. This article should also help introductory psychology teachers who may be using a textbook with inaccuracies in its coverage of the Kitty Genovese story to correct the story in their class lectures. It is important for psychology textbook authors and teachers to stop giving away false information about our discipline whenever possible. The Kitty Genovese story is a good example of when this is easily possible.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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