ABSTRACT
“Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?,” Paul Slovic asks. 1 Why do we so often turn a “blind eye to murder”? 2 It’s a simple question, but one that’s hard to give a simple answer to. Perhaps it has much to do with the famous “bystander effect,” which has been replicated numerous times by psychologists. Inspired originally by a horrific attack on a young woman called Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in New York in 1964, social psychologists have repeatedly investigated the conditions under which one individual will assist another in distress or danger, finding that most people are all too willing to just walk past someone who seems to be suffering.
