alt Hacker News> But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation.
This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
> Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
For the curious, I recommend reading some recent reexaminations of the Kitty Genovese case. Most people's perception of it is as a demonstration of the bystander effect, but if you look more closely, that is not a very honest take of what happened. That angle however is something that shocks people and grabs attention, which makes it a very successful meme.
Rutget Bregman writes about this in his book Humankind, as well as other similar cases. Some snippets of it can be found online.