The legacy of the 38 witnesses and the importance of getting history right.

We are pleased to respond to Brock’s (2008) comment on our article (Manning, Levine, & Collins, September 2007) examining the impact of the 38-witnesses story on the social psychology of helping, particularly because this response allows us to thank the various people who have contacted us following our article’s publication to engage us in a number of constructive, scholarly debates. Here we respond to Brock’s substantive points in turn. Brock’s (2008) first argument is that the 38-witnesses story “did not launch the social psychology of helping” (p. 561). The implied criticism is that, as the story was not the starting point of the helping research tradition, it cannot have had the impact we suggested. The problem with this criticism is that nowhere in our article did we suggest that the story was the starting point of the helping research tradition in social psychology. Brock is right to caution against collapsing the entire helping tradition into a single research strand: Bystander intervention is not the whole of helping behavior, and if our article gave such an impression then that was unintended. However, we did argue—and continue to maintain—that the 38-witnesses story has had a powerful impact on bystander intervention research in particular and, through that, on the general area of research on helping behavior. Brock’s (2008) second criticism of our article is also based on a misunderstanding. We explicitly acknowledged the inventiveness and scope of studies in the bystander effect tradition, and we are happy to repeat that acknowledgement. Moreover, the claim that Dovidio’s (1984) review gives the lie to our argument that the 38-witnesses story has curtailed the psychological imagination is a red herring. The bystander effect literature is an impressive example of creative diversity within a particular set of parameters. It is our argument that the 38witnesses story was responsible for setting those parameters. Much of the substance of our article was devoted to showing how Latané and Darley (1968, 1970) in particular enrolled the negative figure of the group into the study of bystander behavior when it is not clear that, in the story of the 38 witnesses, there was much about the bystanders that can be said to have constituted a group. We suggested that the emergence of the idea of the group as a source of inaction (alongside the established idea that groups are dangerous because they promote excitation) is an important development in the history of the group in psychology. We concluded that the 38-witnesses parable has played an important role in creating a default position in which, for bystander intervention to occur, the constraining effects of the group have to be overcome. The central charge that Brock (2008) made against our argument is that “(s)cores of conditions under which groups both facilitate and inhibit interventions have now been empirically delineated” (p. 561). First, we acknowledge that there is work in the traditional bystander literature which shows that groups can facilitate rather than inhibit helping—indeed, we cited examples in our article. However, we argue that these studies are a minority and are seen as interesting partly because of the hold the 38-witnesses story has on the imagination of the discipline. They are cast as examples of the group failing to inhibit helping rather than in service of a theory about how groups can facilitate helping. Second, we suggest that, as a result of the 38-witnesses story, the literature on bystander behavior has been working with an impoverished idea of what constitutes a group. We believe there is more to group processes than the presence, absence, or number of others. The fact that a more nuanced approach to the group has failed to make an impact on bystander research is, we argue, something that can be traced back to the 38-witnesses story. Brock’s (2008) third point seems unrelated to the substance of our article. We might question whether the helping literature is any more “vast and nuanced” (Brock, 2008, p. 561) than a number of others or whether Zimbardo’s (2004) review is unlike any other in its selectivity or simplification. Furthermore, it was not the only source we used to question the utility of research in the field. In raising his three considerations of our article, Brock (2008) drew heavily on Dovidio’s (1984) authoritative review of the traditional helping literature. We have great respect for Dovidio’s work, and we have ourselves been influenced by it. While Brock suggested our argument is undermined by the fact that Dovidio did not include the 38-witnesses story in his 1984 review, we instead point out that, in a more recent review of the literature, the 38-witnesses story is again given prominence: Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, and Schroeder (2005) stated that “most current research has its roots in lay and scientific reactions to the nonresponsive bystanders in the brutal murder of Katherine “Kitty” Genovese in 1964” (p. 366). The implication is that we cannot use either source on its own to reach conclusions about the historical importance of the 38-witnesses story. Finally, we turn to Brock’s (2008) support for the continued use of “the Genovese story, even as corrected . . . as a revered anecdote in undergraduate textbooks” (p. 561) and to his title referring to the “negligible scholarly impact” of the story. We are happy to leave it to readers of this journal to judge whether it is wise to continue to use in textbooks inaccurate accounts presented as facts, and whether it is sensible to conclude that despite being read by many thousands of students and researchers, the story of the 38 witnesses has had “negligible scholarly impact.”