Introduction The typical approach which the mainstream psychologists adopted to study the issue of bystander intervention is conducting a series of experiments, such as Darley and Latané’s study on ‘bystander intervention in emergencies’ in 1968. However, this typical approach was criticized as inadequate by Cherry's feminist approach in 1995. This essay will first discuss the study done by Darley and Latané, and then explain the critique made by Cherry.
Darley and Latané’s experimental investigation Darley and Latané’s research into bystander intervention was mainly led by the murder of Kitty Genovese, who was a white young woman, in New York in 1964. She was killed and then raped by a man on street. The most incredible part of the incident was that at least 38 witnesses had observed the attack, but none of them came to her to intervene or even called the…show more content… The study done by Darley and Latané was a theoretical construction based on behavioral and situational explanations. Cherry thought that Darley and Latané chose to veer away from a sociocultural analysis of the event. They were subtly guided by their socialization into a discipline’s normative beliefs about appropriate intellectual frameworks and scientifically respectable methodologies for bringing together hunch and evidence. Although the meaning of an event was constructed, their vision of the event was constricted. Cherry reminded that Kitty and the assailant, Winston Moseley, were living in a society where people had little concern to intervene violence directed towards women. Such details were ignored, and the event was abstracted as the normal phenomenon of interest like an emergency and no one intervened to help. Unlike Darley and Latané‘s perspective, Cherry would rather describe the event as a violence which was directed at yet another woman by a man and no people intervened to aid