Harold Takooshian is an American academic and psychologist perhaps best known as an expert on the Kitty Genovese case, having spent many years studying the subject and the role that the "bystander effect" played therein.
Biograpghy
Takooshian graduated from City University of New York in 1979 with a PhD. At CUNY Takooshian was a student of the famed social psychologistStanley Milgram known for his controversial experiments on obedience. In the 1985Hollywood film "Experimenter" starting Peter Sarsgaard as 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". He also appeared with Daniel Bruhl, the actor who potrays the role of the titular character, who was so moved by the case that he went on to write "Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case", 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. 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 '", co-authored by Takooshian and Alexander Voronov was published by the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. Takooshian also contributed several entries in Kenneth T. Jackson's The Encyclopedia of New York City published by Yale University Press. 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 and the U.S. Federal sentencing of the radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
