Alan Collins
Alan Collins is a psychologist at Lancaster University and a co-author of the 2007 American Psychologist paper that reconstructed the Kitty Genovese case from archival sources, with Rachel Manning as first author and Mark Levine. That paper is the reason the parable of the thirty-eight witnesses can no longer be told the way textbooks told it for forty years. Readers following the citation trail should note that several psychologists publish under this name, including Allan M. Collins of spreading-activation fame, who is a different person.
Who they are
Collins is in the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University. His research is on the history of psychology: how concepts such as memory have been taken up, reshaped and passed on within the field, and how tracing that history changes what you notice about the way a concept is used now. He has also written on the development of psychology in Britain and on the relationship between the discipline and the society around it.
His contribution to the 2007 paper is not separable from that of his co-authors. Academic papers do not divide credit by section, and this page will not invent a division. What can be said is that the paper is a piece of historical work as much as a psychological one. It asks where a claim came from, follows it back through the secondary literature to the primary documents, and reports that the documents do not contain it. A historian of the discipline is the natural third name on a paper of that shape.
Beyond the 2007 paper he does not appear elsewhere in the bystander literature, and this site makes no claim about his views on the effect itself.
Key papers
Manning, R., Levine, M., & Collins, A. (2007), "The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses," American Psychologist, 62(6), 555-562. With Rachel Manning as first author and Mark Levine.
Key ideas
Psychology's concepts have histories, and the history usually explains something the current usage hides.
The 2007 reconstruction is archival history applied to a psychological claim. Its method is the reason it worked where forty years of citation had not.
What one author on a three-author paper actually did is not recoverable from the published record, and we do not guess at it here.
Sources
- Manning, R., Levine, M., & Collins, A. (2007), "The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses," American Psychologist, 62(6), 555-562.
- Vault note: [[Alan Collins]], which records that no current staff page or Scholar profile could be separated from other academics of the same name as of 10 September 2026.