I’m late on this because I spent yesterday travelling and when I logged on this morning to see the viral video of the grandmother, Karen Klein, being tortured I was appalled. This video is so horrible that I couldn’t even watch the entire thing. I wanted to cry. And much like the mother who choked the teenager bullying her daughter, I wanted to choke those boys.
How do you ridicule a grandmother? A completely innocent elderly lady. The things they say to her are shameless. They even go so far as to say that her children should commit suicide. Even when she starts to cry, they continue.
Everyone is asking, what is wrong with these kids? How do you explain such horrible behavior? Do we blame the parents? The media? Where does this lack of empathy come from? Are these kids monsters? And why doesn’t anyone try to stop these boys? What about the other kids on the bus?
As horrible as this situation was, it proves what social psychologists have known for years. Strange things happen when groups of people get together. The group exerts a rather perplexing, but incredibly strong influence on individual behavior. The group is powerful.
How many times have you heard of someone getting raped, killed, or hurt in broad daylight and wondered why nobody did anything to help? Have you heard of the bystander effect? Countless studies have showed that having other people around decreases helping behavior. It diffuses personal responsibility. Everyone is assuming someone else will help. The Holocaust is probably one of our best examples. The most famous case is the one of Kitty Genovese who was murdered in the streets of Chicago while she screamed for help. Numerous people watched, but nobody called the police.
People will do things in groups that they would never do as an individual. It’s called the herd mentality. The likelihood of one of these boys terrorizing this woman by themselves is pretty slim, but the likelihood increases greatly when their peers are engaged in the behavior. We follow the crowd. Our desire to belong often overrides our desire to be a good person.
These explanations don’t make this event any better or any less terrible. They do help provide us with a framework to begin trying to understand how and why this behavior occurred. And if you’re like me, you’re always looking for these kinds of answers whenever something seemingly inexplainable and reprehensible occurs.
P.S. We made it!