Harold Takooshian

Last updated
Harold Takooshian
Alma mater City University of New York
Occupation(s)psychologist, scholar, professor
Employer Fordham University
Known for bystander effect studies

Harold Takooshian (born 1949) is an American psychologist, scholar, and professor at Fordham University. He is best known as an expert on the Kitty Genovese murder case, having spent many years studying the subject and the role that the "bystander effect" played therein. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Takooshian graduated from City University of New York (CUNY) in 1979 with a PhD. [4] [5] At CUNY, Takooshian was a student of the famed social psychologist Stanley Milgram known for his controversial experiments on obedience. [5] [6]

Career

He has been a member of the Fordham University faculty since 1975. Takooshian is a widely published essayist having written articles for periodicals including; the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, [7] International Psychology Bulletin and The Counseling Psychologist, among many other publications. [8]

Takooshian is currently a professor of psychology and of Urban Studies at Fordham University. [9] He is a past President of Psi Chi the worlds' largest psychology honors society and was the 2009-10 recipient of the organization's Florence L. Denmark Faculty Advisor Award. [10] [11] He is also a former president and the current secretary of the Manhattan Psychological Association. [12]

Takooshian has hosted a number of symposiums on the Genovese case, including; "Remembering Catherine "Kitty" Genovese: A public forum" to mark the fortieth anniversary of the event. Among the participants on the panel were the New York Times executive editor and columnist A.M. Rosenthal (1922-2006), who was so moved by the case that he went on to write "Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case", [13] which brought worldwide attention to the incident, Charles Skoller, the prosecutor of the crime and author of "Twisted Confessions: The True Story Behind the Kitty Genovese and Barbara Kralik Murder Trials", and several other experts in fields germane to the story.

He has also written at length on subjects relating to his own Armenian heritage, Armenia, and Armenian Americans. [14]

In 1987-88 he was a Fulbright scholar to the USSR and then In 2013-14 he was the recipient of a second Fulbright Scholarship, this time to lecture in the since his prior visit reconstituted nation of Russia under the aegis a project entitled "Social Psychology of City Life Across Cultures". Subsequent to this second scholarly visit the article "On the Russian-American Cooperation in Social Psychology (Professor H. Takooshian's Visit to Russia in September–December 2013)'", co-authored by Takooshian and Alexander Voronov was published by the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. [15]

Takooshian also contributed several entries in Kenneth T. Jackson's The Encyclopedia of New York City published by Yale University Press. [16] Among his most recent publications is the article "Internationalizing Undergraduate Psychology Education: Trends, Techniques, and Technologies" in American Psychologist co-authored with Scott Plous, Grant Rich and Uwe P. Gielen. He is often consulted by media sources on a variety of other current subjects; including in different instances; Donald Trump and political correctness, the Brian Williams embellishment of the truth uproar [17] and the United States Federal sentencing of Abu Hamza al-Masri.[ citation needed ]

Acting and film

In the 1985 film Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram. Takooshian acted as a science advisor to the feature's director, Michael Almereyda, as well as performing on screen in a small role as a "familiar stranger". [18] [19]

Takooshian also appeared with Daniel Bruhl, in the TNT series The Alienist adapted from the novel by Caleb Carr of the same name, in the "Alienst: The Birth of Psychology" a historical short produced by the cable channel to accompany the feature program. [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milgram experiment</span> Series of social psychology experiments

The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley Milgram</span> American social psychologist

Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Kitty Genovese</span> 1964 murder in New York City, associated with the bystander effect

In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was raped and stabbed outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens in New York City, New York, United States. Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article erroneously claiming that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid.

The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in presence of other people. First proposed in 1964 after the murder of Kitty Genovese, much research, mostly in psychology research laboratories, has focused on increasingly varied factors, such as the number of bystanders, ambiguity, group cohesiveness, and diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial. If a single individual is asked to complete the task alone, the sense of responsibility will be strong, and there will be a positive response; however, if a group is required to complete the task together, each individual in the group will have a weak sense of responsibility, and will often shrink back in the face of difficulties or responsibilities. The theory was prompted by the murder of Kitty Genovese about which it was wrongly reported that 38 bystanders watched passively. Recent research has focused on "real world" events captured on security cameras, and the coherency and robustness of the effect has come under question. More recent studies also show that this effect can generalize to workplace settings, where subordinates often refrain from informing managers regarding ideas, concerns, and opinions.

Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure". Obedience is generally distinguished from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority. Depending on context, obedience can be seen as moral, immoral, or amoral.

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References

  1. ↑ Colangelo, Lisa L. "Kitty Genovese continues to fascinate scholars 50 years after her shocking murder in Queens". nydailynews.com.
  2. ↑ "It's true: Cities are meaner". Salon. March 24, 2012.
  3. ↑ "Harold Takooshian on Kitty Genovese and the Bystander Effect". SoundCloud.
  4. ↑ "Armenian in New York City: A Fascinating History". Institute of Slavic, Eastern Europe, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley (ISEEES). University of California, Berkeley, Regents of the University of California . Retrieved 2021-05-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. 1 2 Perry, Gina (2013-09-03). Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. New Press, The. pp. 239–240. ISBN   978-1-59558-925-5.
  6. ↑ Blass, Thomas (1999-11-01). Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Psychology Press. ISBN   978-1-135-68307-8.
  7. ↑ Giardino, Joseph; Black, Natasha; Donald, Hillary; Bhalla, Rukmini; Takooshian, Harold (January 1, 2011). "Public attitudes toward the ethics of organ donation". Psychology Faculty Publications.
  8. ↑ Takooshian, Harold (July 1, 2003). "Counseling Psychology's Wide New Horizons". The Counseling Psychologist. 31 (4): 420–426. doi:10.1177/0011000003031004005. S2CID   145488324.
  9. ↑ N, Miah Md. "Harold Takooshian". www.fordham.edu.
  10. ↑ "Eye on Psi Chi: Spring 1999 - Psi Chi, The International Honor Society in Psychology". www.psichi.org.
  11. ↑ "Psi Beta Newsletter". psibeta.org.
  12. ↑ "MPA Board News Archives".
  13. ↑ Rosenthal, Abraham Michael (2008). Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. ISBN   978-1933633299.
  14. ↑ Zake, I. (May 25, 2009). Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees. Springer. ISBN   9780230621596 – via Google Books.
  15. ↑ H, Takooshian; A.Ya, Voronov (July 26, 2014). "On the Russian-American Cooperation in Social Psychology (Professor H. Takooshian's Visit to Russia in September-December, 2013)". Social Psychology and Society.
  16. ↑ Jackson, Kenneth T.; Keller, Lisa; Flood, Nancy (December 1, 2010). The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition. Yale University Press. ISBN   978-0300182576 – via Google Books.
  17. ↑ "Brian Williams suspended for it, but everybody embellishes". nydailynews.com.
  18. ↑ "Eye For Film: Interview with Harold Takooshian about Stanley Milgram and Experimenter". www.eyeforfilm.co.uk.
  19. ↑ "Harold Takooshian". IMDb.
  20. ↑ "Birth Of Psychology". www.tntdrama.com.
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