Quote:
Originally Posted by NHB7
It is fucked up, but guess who left her sitting there? Every day normal people. Its easy to judge them, and in fact they may see this video and say, "What was I thinking." Nonetheless, this reality that we will ignore people when they are in trouble has been proven time and time again. The reason hero's make news is because heros are rare. It is referred to as the bystander effect.
An example was a woman named Kitty Genovese (so sometimes they even call it Genovese Syndrome). In 1974 this woman was stabbed by an unknown attacker on a street corner as she walked to her apartment. She screamed and the man left. People looked out their windows and she screamed to them, "Please help, I've been stabbed!" Instead of helping, they watched as the man came back and stabbed her several more times again and ran off again. Now she crawled to her apartment complex of the course of the next twenty minutes screaming for help. Buy this time almost all the lights on and dozens of people were watching from their windows. As she reached the front of her apartment the man came up and stabbed her to death. After her body was found, it turned out that not one person had even called the police, but that at least thirty had witnessed it.
So yeah, its fucked up. Its a fucked up part of human nature. And we can all think of ourselves as unique from it, but until we are in the situation, we don't really know.
When I was 19 I got into a fight in a park. During said fight, some guys started stabbing my friend. Now before that time I would have told you, "never leave a friend behind, you got to have your friends back." But now I can tell you what I did. I ran. And as I ran I heard him screaming, "Don't Leave! Don't Leave!" And in my head I thought "Don't leave!" But my feet kept running.
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20/20 several years ago did a study in NY, Chicago, L.A. about people helping people. They had a producer act like a drunk and simply pass out in the middle of the thousands of people walking to and from work in those cities.
The study revealed something we already knew. Nobody stopped to help.
However....
The study revealed in each city, that when even ONE person stops to help, 2, 3, 4 and more people came to pitch in and help the initial person who tried to help.
It's a group mentality. If an entire group ignores someone in need, everyone does. If one person stops and helps, everyone then starts to help.
It's a puzzling thing in human psychology that nobody seems to h ave a good theory on as to why.