Evil :Follow

When (good?) people do nothing

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2010/04/27/ac.gupta.left.to.die.cnn

Well, it was already known he was a homeless day laborer, so folks have probably seen him sleeping on the sidewalk before.

I don't get why it took so long for someone to check on him. It's one thing if the guy is sleeping sitting up or at least face up, but when someone is 'sleeping' on a sidewalk face down... you'd think that would set off some alarms.

There are two well-known phenomena in play, here: the bystander effect, which simply put means that the more people there are at the scene of any problem, the greater the tendency to assume that someone else will take care of it; and also the prevalence of homelessness in urban areas has had the effect of training people to not notice when someone is lying on the sidewalk or in a doorway. People didn't "see" the pool of blood because for the most part people didn't "see" the homeless guy lying there.

The two who obviously did notice but apparently did nothing are more problematic. I can't account for someone stopping to take a picture, or someone else stopping to help and then failing to do so.

And what about the woman he saved? Seems like the least she could have done would be to call for help from a safe spot. Maybe she's still running, I dunno.

I'm not sure what you're referencing, here.

I suspect that people walking past him, if they noticed blood, were too cowardly to stop lest there still be a dangerous knife-wielding lunatic in the area. That doesn't excuse them for not calling for help, though. Most likely by the time they were out of the area they figured "someone else" would surely have called it in by now.

It was someone else's problem. Bystander effect.

Oh, dunno. Queens might be a whole other world as far as that goes, I have no idea.

Probably because you don't know the details of the case.

"Experts" spouting ******** makes for great news.

Kitty Genovese was a hot story in the 60s that prompted a lot of research into the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility. However the case itself was nowhere near as described in the paper (with 32 people fully aware of the situation but doing nothing). In that particular case most people were only aware of parts of the event and made many false conclusions that were far more probable.



It is true than in cities a person who is lying down on the ground is less likely to be checked than he/she would be in a small town, but there is no malicious cause behind this. Largely it has to do with simple population density.

Edited, Apr 28th 2010 6:03pm by Allegory