You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

The most famous illustration of this phenomenon is the story of Kitty Genovese. According to a newspaper article in 1964, she was stabbed by an attacker at 3 A.M. in a car park in front of her New York City apartment complex. The attacker ran away when she screamed for help, but not one of the thirty-eight witnesses came to her rescue. The story goes on to say the attacker returned over and over for thirty minutes while people watched on from surrounding apartment windows as he stabbed her. The story has since been thoroughly debunked, a case of sensational reporting, but at the time it was written it led to intense interest in the phenomenon from psychologists. Social psychologists started studying the bystander effect soon after the story went viral, and they determined that the more people present when a person needs emergency help, the less likely it is any one of them will lend a hand.