Article The Bystander Effect started from a lie

[C C]

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critic...tarted-lie

EXCERPT: This real-life tragedy has now become a myth, described by one academic paper as The Parable of the 38 Witnesses. When its authors flipped through the 10 most popular textbooks aimed at psychology undergraduate students, they found the story in all of them. Every textbook claimed that nobody intervened and that the cops were called after Kitty Genovese had died, and almost all of them suggested that 38 witnesses had simply watched from their windows as Ms. Genovese was brutally attacked for half an hour.

[...] It's not the only time that psychology textbooks have grossly misrepresented a seminal case study—the Hawthorne effect is commonly distorted as well...

[...] Laboratories will usually simulate one or two other bystanders, but in an urban environment, the reality is that we are surrounded by many people, and we do tend to help out people in need. This strange dichotomy is an extreme example of the problem scientists often face. Do you create a fully artificial situation in order to control as many variables as possible, or do you study what happens in the natural world, even though your data will be full of noise and variables you cannot control?

In the lab, we become less helpful the more bystanders we perceive… but in the real world, at least in this one dataset of 219 incidents, we are revealed to be Good Samaritans. I think both types of experiments have their place. Neither explains it all. Human psychology, after all, is quite complex. Embracing this complexity and avoiding oversimplifications is crucial if we want to truly understand the human mind and the universe around us... (MORE - details)

Bystander effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

[Magical Realist]

I don't trust McGill University's claims very much knowing them to be some much-revered bastion of scientistic debunkery. But I do trust this from the Wiki article:

"Philpot et al. (2019) examined over 200 sets of real-life surveillance video recordings from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and South Africa to answer "the most pressing question for actual public victims": whether help would be forthcoming at all. They found that intervention was the norm, and in over 90% of conflicts one or more bystanders intervened to provide help. Increased bystander presence increased the likelihood that someone would intervene."

Ahh..my faith in humanity has been restored. I could never understand that lack of altruistic interventionism to save someone knowing my own almost too rash compulsion to act on such in urgent situations. There is hope for us after all.

[Zinjanthropos]

In emergency situations its best to not to put your own life in danger, think of yourself first. I was told this while being trained for a gas utility job. You're no good to anyone if dead or incapacitated. I would think that philosophy is good when dealing with strangers but if your own family members are in danger then that may cause a switch.