It's not necessarily heartlessness. People are weird that way: in experiments where someone is hurt and there is nobody else around, we tend to help right away, but in situations where there is one other person we are less likely. When there are two people we are even less likely to help. In a crowd of people, you're good as dead.
Its called the Bystander Effect or Genovese Effect.......I read the story on this awhile ago as it relates to human psychology.........sad shit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese
Science-fiction author and cultural
provocateur Harlan Ellison, in articles published in 1970 and 1971 in the
Los Angeles Free Press and in
Rolling Stone, referred to the witnesses as "thirty-six motherfuckers"
[43] and stated that they "stood by and watched" Genovese "get knifed to death right in front of them, and wouldn't make a move"
[44] and that "thirty-eight people watched" Genovese "get knifed to death in a New York street".
[45] In an article in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, published in June 1988 and later reprinted in his book
Harlan Ellison's Watching, Ellison referred to the murder as "witnessed by thirty-eight neighbors, not one of whom made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police". He cited reports he claimed to have read that one man, "viewing the murder from his third-floor apartment window, stated later that he rushed to turn up his radio so he wouldn't hear the woman's screams". Ellison says that the reports attributed the "get involved" quote to nearly all of the 38 who supposedly witnessed the attack.
[46]
Public reaction to murders happening in the neighborhood supposedly did not change. According to a
The New York Timesarticle dated December 28, 1974, ten years after Genovese's murder, 25-year-old Sandra Zahler was beaten to death early Christmas morning in an apartment within a building that overlooked the site of the Genovese attack. Neighbors again said they heard screams and "fierce struggles" but did nothing.
[47]
