In the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, twenty-eight-year-old bartender Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was murdered and raped on the street in Kew Gardens, New York. The incident initially did not receive much attention until Martin Gansberg's infamous article, "Thirty-Eight Who Saw a Murder, Didn't Call the Police," was published in the New York Times two weeks later. In reality, only twelve people witnessed the event, but each did nothing to significantly help Genovese until it was too late. The Genovese murder has become the definitive example of the "bystander effect," the social phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to help someone in need if other people are present. The bystander effect occurs wherever there is an ambiguous situation, or where a lack of action can be rationalized through a distribution of responsibility in a large group, or where the presence of others presents a significant risk to the bystander such that he or she is afraid to provide help. The bystander effect results from people misinterpreting an ambiguous emergency situation as a non-emergency based on their own past experiences or social cues taken from others. When faced with ambiguous situations, people initially look to past experiences to find interpretative cues. However, most people have limited experience with emergencies and have a tendency to underestimate the severity of the situation – a cognitive phenomenon known as normality bias – and therefore underreact. In Gansberg's article, a witness to the Genovese murder states that she "thought it was a lovers' quarrel." This seems like a reasonable assumption since public arguments between lovers are much more commonly observed than rape, especially in a safe environment… middle of paper… without any intervention. Therefore, no one provides help when others are present because they are afraid that doing so may pose a significant risk to themselves. The public murder of Kitty Genovese was a tragic consequence of the bystander effect, the sociological phenomenon in which the mere presence of others makes people less likely to help strangers in need. This bystander apathy results from an ambiguous situation that people misinterpret as a non-emergency based on their own limited experience of emergencies and social cues observed by others. It can also result from a diffusion of responsibility that occurs in large groups as people have a tendency to rationalize their apathetic reaction. Finally, in some cases, the bystander effect occurs when people are afraid to help in front of an audience because they would put themselves at risk..