The World’s most peaceful societies actively teach their children to be cooperative, non-violent, and helpful. One a personal level, psychologists have succeeded in teaching some people to control their anger and aggressive impulses. Anger control refers to personal strategies for reducing or curbing anger. The key to remaining calm is to define upsetting situation as problems to be solved. Therefore, to limit anger, people are taught to: Define the problem as precisely as possible. Make a list of the possible solutions. Rank the likely success of each solution. Choose a solution and try it. Assess how successful the solution was, and make adjustments if necessary. Taking these steps has helped many people to lessen tendencies toward child abuse, family violence, and other destructive outbursts. 

Large scale efforts have also had some success. For instance, a program called “Youth Against Violence: Choose to De-Fuse” was developed in New York City to help hood and ghetto youths resist violence. The program is focused on creating beneficial peer pressure for choosing non-violent solutions to conflict. The use of real-life situations, speech, and body language added to the effectiveness of the program. For the more immediate future, it is clear that we need more people who are willing to engage in prosocial behavior (actions that are constructive, altruistic, or helpful to others). Late one night, tenants of a Queens, New York, apartment building watched and listened in horror as a young woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered on the sidewalk outside. From the safety of their rooms, no fewer than 38 people heard the agonized screams as her assailant stabbed her, was frightened off, and returned to stab her again.

 Kitty Genovese’s murder took over 30 minutes, but none of her neighbors tried to help. None even called the police until after the attack ended. Perhaps it is understandable that no one wanted to get involved. After all, it could have been a violent lovers’ quarrel. Or helping might have meant risking personal injury. However, what prevented people from at least calling the police? Is this not an example of the alienation of city life? News reports treated this incident as evident of a breakdown in social ties caused by the impersonality of the city, or maybe because her neighbors were jealous of her? While it is true that living in the ghetto or the hood can be dehumanizing, as people act like ignorant ghetto trash, who just want to pop out an army of babies so they can get welfare, food stamps, and medi-cal. These hood rats, their goals in life are to smoke weed, smell like old chicken grease, eat barbecue, and watermelon, and drink Kool-aid out of jars, while they get their hair weaves, on the front steps, gossip, and perform oral sex for $5 in alley ways.  However, this does not fully explain bystander apathy (unwillingness of bystanders to offer help during emergencies). Many of them get off on violence and chaos.