Kitty Genovese was murdered Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case in the middle of an Uptown New York street. The criminal tortured the victim for half an hour, and not one of the 38 witnesses not only helped her, but did not even call the police.
Rushing to discuss the biblical parable about helping people, only 10% of theological seminary students stopped From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior to help a sick person. The rest simply passed by.
In social psychologist Stanley Milgram's BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF OBEDIENCE experiment, "teachers" thought they were punishing "students" with electric shocks for incorrect answers, and gradually increased the voltage. 65% of the participants reached 450 volts, despite the fact that the actors playing the “students” portrayed suffering and the “teachers” saw how bad they were.
Are all these people fucking sadists and indifferent bastards? Not at all.
Witnesses to Kitty's murder knew that everyone could hear her screams, and thought that someone had probably already called the police. The students were in a hurry to get to the lecture: in the second group, where participants were given more time, 63% helped the patient. In Milgram's experiment, people were told to shock "students" and they simply obeyed orders.
Most likely, in these circumstances, you would have done the same thing. People are extremely susceptible to the influence of the situation, but this is not at all obvious when looking at the event from the perspective of an observer.
We justify our actions by the situation, but in other people’s affairs the circumstances often remain behind the scenes, so the individual is criticized. This phenomenon is called the fundamental attribution error, and we encounter it all the time in everyday life.
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