Moore's comments about Flight 93

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed Jan 15 08:37:06 PST 2003



> At 3:02 PM -0800 1/14/03, Brian O. Sheppard wrote:
> >According to a columnist from the British Independent, Moore
> described
> >the 9/11 bravehearts as "scaredy-cats because they were
> mostly white.
> >If the passengers had included black men, those killers, with their
> >puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been
> crushed by
> >the dudes."

Mr. Moore needs some training in social psychology. Behavior on the airliner he refers to is an example of "bystander apathy" - a well-documented phenomenon that when people are in a crowd they are LESS likely to intervene in emergencies to help others.

Are Blacks less likely to than Whites to succumb to this phenomenon? A search for 'bystander apathy' on PSYCInfo data base returned the following:

AU: Colman,-Andrew-M TI: Crowd psychology in South African murder trials. PY: 1991 SO: American-Psychologist. 1991 Oct; Vol 46(10): 1071-1079. PB: US: American Psychological Assn. IS: 0003-066X AB: South African courts have recently accepted social psychological phenomena as extenuating factors in murder trials. In 1 important case, 8 railway workers were convicted of murdering 4 strike breakers during an industrial dispute. The court accepted conformity, obedience, group polarization, deindividuation, bystander apathy, and other well-established psychological phenomena as extenuating factors for 4 of the 8 defendants, but sentenced the others to death. In a 2nd trial, death sentences of 5 defendants for the "necklace" killing of a young woman were reduced to 20 mo imprisonment in the light of similar social psychological evidence. Practical and ethical issues arising from expert psychological testimony are discussed.

I am pretty sure that some South African racists argued that Whites would have never behaved that way.

Wojtek



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