Summery

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 * =Three point summary of the article [].=

Many news stories of disasters, like the movie 2012, focus on individual victims to bring the vastness of the destruction down to human terms. In so doing, they enlist our empathic responses. To varying degrees, we feel sad and anguished as we witness the pain and suffering of the victims. Research shows that when we see others being harmed, our brains react in similar ways as if we were being harmed. The areas of the brain involved in this reaction extend beyond the amygdala to regions of the cortex involved in analyzing and interpreting the behavior of others, the so-called "theory of mind." These events also stimulate us to think of our own experiences of pain or [|trauma]; in other words, our "autobiographical [|memory]" (Spreng & Mar, 2010). We remember the times when we were in danger or in pain and our brain, in a sense, reaches out and imagines how the actual victims are thinking and feeling. Real-life situations that should trigger empathy, such as watching a person being victimized in a crime, don't often motivate us to action. Research on the bystander effect shows that in the wrong circumstances we can be oddly insensitive to the suffering of others. However, what neuroscientists are showing is that rather than being programmed to ignore other people who are in pain, our brains are capable of bringing that pain poignantly home. In the weeks following a disaster, news stories eventually shift away from covering the stories of destruction to occasional reports of the continued suffering of victims. We certainly saw this happen in the case of the Haitian earthquake. I suppose it's natural that the media can spend only so long on one tragedy until politics, celebrity meltdowns, or the news about the economy grab the headlines. However, the victims still need our help. You may not be able to maintain your brain's neural circuitry of empathy either, so if you're going to provide assistance, do it sooner rather than later. Social media, such as [|twitter] and Facebook, offer important tools to provide support.

- In the wrong circumstances we choose not to sypathsize but to ignore them causing the bystander effect.
On October 24th, 2009, as many as 20 witnesses watched as a 15 year old girl was brutally assaulted and raped outside a homecoming dance in Richmond, CA. The viciousness of the attack was shocking, but what was even more shocking was the fact that so many people witnessed the attack and yet failed to intervene or call police. As one of the police officers involved in the case states, "what makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it." Some of the bystanders reportedly even laughed and took photos of the assault with their cell phones. How could people just stand by and watch something this horrible happen to a young, innocent girl? Some have suggested that the eyewitnesses' failure to report the incident likely resulted from a concern over being labeled as a snitch. Although this is possible, social psychological research on the bystander effect suggests a different cause - there were too many eyewitnesses present. The bystander effect refers to the fact that people are less likely to offer help when they are in a group than when they are alone. Research on this effect was inspired by a real-world account that seems hauntingly similar to the recent event in Richmond.
 * =Three point summary of the article [].=

In 1964, 28 year old Kitty Genovese was raped and stabbed to death in front of her apartment complex. The attack lasted over 30 minutes and was witnessed by several dozen people who failed to report the incident. Some failed to realize that an actual crime was going on, claiming they thought it was a "lover's quarrel", whereas others realized they were witnessing a crime, but failed to report it because they assumed that someone else had already called the police. A similar incident took place in New Bedford, MA, in 1983 when several men raped a woman on a pool table in front of several witnesses in a bar. The 1988 film "The Accused" depicted this incident and Jodie Foster went on to earn an Academy Award for her performance as the rape victim. More recently, a 22 year old college student died from water intoxication in 2005 when four of his fellow fraternity brothers failed to intervene during a deadly hazing incident. To determine the underlying reasons why these witnesses failed to help, John Darley and Bibb Latane conducted a series of lab experiments to examine how the presence of others influences people's helping behavior in an emergency situation. The results of these studies suggest there are two clear reasons why the eyewitnesses in the Richmond case may have failed to help.