THE MYTH OF APATHY
As Nicholas Lemann writes, Abe Rosenthal was indeed responsible for creating a myth, regarding the circumstances surrounding the murder of Kitty Genovese, but the myth was not, as Lemann suggests, that some three dozen people heard and failed to report screams on a March night fifty years ago (Books, March 10th). Instead, it was Rosenthal’s insistence that the cause was moral decay, urban alienation, or “apathy,” which Rosenthal considered a disease, “a symptom of a terrible reality in the human condition.” Unconvinced by Rosenthal’s claim that simply “by happenstance all thirty-eight did that night what each one alone might have done any night,” four colleagues—John Darley, Judith Rodin, Lee Ross, and Richard Nisbett—and I designed experiments to test the idea that the number that made the story so sensational may have contributed to its occurrence in the first place. The resulting discoveries identified three distinct social processes now described in textbooks as “bystander inhibition.” Far from being an illness, failure to respond results from social influence, the understanding of which can be used to help individuals act in closer accord with their moral predisposition. Our discoveries contributed to the emergence of the widely respected psychological perspective of “situational determinism,” the idea that behavior arises not so much from within individuals but from the social pressures they face. Ironically, we now know that the myth of apathy was initiated by a headline written after Genovese’s murderer had been caught, as a result of a citizen reporting a crime in progress. The reason the story went viral was that New York and the nation were in the midst of a decade of rising—not falling—social concern.
Bibb Latané
Chapel Hill, N.C.
In seeking to explain Rosenthal’s anger toward Genovese’s apathetic neighbors, Lemann might have delved deeper than the story that Rosenthal provided as the psychological trigger, a life-changing encounter between his sister and a flasher. As an American Jew, Rosenthal had been profoundly affected not just by the enormity of the Holocaust but by the world’s apparent indifference to the victims. In 1958, Rosenthal visited Auschwitz and wrote a seminal essay in the Times Magazine on that place of “unutterable terror,” where an appalling normalcy—sunshine, the laughter of children at the gates—had all but effaced the horror of what had occurred there so recently. While conceding that there was “no news” to report from Auschwitz, as “the screams can no longer be heard,” Rosenthal felt an overwhelming impulse to bear witness and to speak for the dead. In particular, he was moved by a picture of a girl, “twenty-two years old, plumply pretty, blond,” smiling sweetly. The published police mug shot of Genovese, twenty-eight years old, staring hopefully at the camera, looking uncannily like Millie Perkins (who had played Anne Frank in the movie version of her life), must have brought all that bottled-up emotion to the surface.
John V. H. Dippel
Salisbury, Conn.
Rosenthal may have written that Marty Gansberg was a cub reporter, but, when he sent Gansberg out to write a follow-up story on the Genovese murder, he was not sending an amateur journalist. Marty had worked in the Times’ __editorial department for more than twenty years. He also taught a course in journalism. I worked with Marty on the makeup desk for five years in the late nineteen-fifties. No one who knew him would believe that he created facts for a news story. Whatever spin the editors put on that story, I believe that what Marty reported was accurate.
Jerry Werksman
Newport Beach, Calif.
