In the early morning of March 13, 1964, twenty-eight-year-old barmaid Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was murdered and raped on the street in Kew Gardens, New York. The incident did not initially gain 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 Genoese murder has become the definitive example of the "bystander effect", a social phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to help someone in distress in the presence of other people. The bystander effect occurs wherever there is an ambiguous situation, or when inaction can be rationalized by a diffusion of responsibilities in a large group, or when the presence of others presents a significant risk to the bystander such as 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 received from others. When faced with ambiguous situations, people first look to past experiences for interpretive clues. However, most people have limited experience with emergency situations and tend to underestimate the severity of the situation – a cognitive phenomenon known as normality bias – and therefore underreact. In Gansberg's article, a witness to Genovese's murder said she "thought it was a lovers' quarrel." This seems like a reasonable assumption since public arguments between lovers are much more commonly seen than rape, especially in a safe corner of the paper......without any intervention. So, no one provides help when others are present because they fear it poses a significant risk to themselves. The public murder of Kitty Genovese is a tragic consequence of the bystander effect, the sociological phenomenon in which the mere presence of others makes one less likely to help strangers in distress. This bystander apathy results from an ambiguous situation that people misinterpret as a non-emergency based on their own limited experience of emergency situations and social cues observed in others. It can also result from a diffusion of responsibility that occurs in large groups, with individuals tending to rationalize their apathetic response. And finally, in some cases, the bystander effect occurs when people are afraid to help in front of an audience because it would put them in danger..