14 DAY TRIAL // A hidden camera in Italy captured people's behavior and reactions when faced with a social situation – spotting a missing boy who was supposedly being searched for by his family.
In the video, you can see a helpless-looking young boy, called Cristian, sitting on a park bench while dozens of park-goers pass him by without bothering to stop and ask him about his wellbeing although many of them had previously seen signs announcing his disappearance around the park.
Paradoxically, although the majority of people take the time to read the “missing child” posters, almost everybody fails to notice that the sad nine-year-old boy sitting on the bench nestled right in between the appeals is actually the missing boy, and totally ignores him.
Luckily, the cruel situation was just a social experiment titled “Would You Recognize a Missing Child?” and caught on camera by two Italian pranksters, but the sad part is that it was inspired by a true story.
The boy featured in the video is actually a volunteer actor and the whole situation is a social experiment staged by Matteo Moroni and Diego Dolciami of DM Pranks Productions, the same guys from Magione, Italy, who were behind the killer clown prank that went viral last month.
The makers of the video explained that a total of 50 “missing child” posters have been spread across the park in a bid to find Cristian, but the majority of people preferred to keep minding their own business and not getting involved, so they chose to walk off after reading the signs.
They revealed that they counted a total of 144 walkers-by that day in two hours, very few of which actually approached the child and asked him about his welfare. Some glanced over at the kid after spotting the posters, but carried on walking.
As I've mentioned before, the experiment was inspired by a true story in which a child arrived at the park, dehydrated and under shock, and sit down on a bench near some posters of him because he was in such a bad shape he wasn't even able to talk. Sadly, nobody noticed him for a whole day, and nobody asked him why he was there alone. Eventually, he was found there by his own mother who never stopped looking for him.
Talking about his videos, Matteo – one of the men behind this social experiment – said in a previous interview, “I think we are doing some content never ever seen on the web, especially our social experiments and also our extreme pranks.[...] Our social experiments are a pure eye opener for the people.”
Recently, this type of social experiments that show the increasing lack of compassion in humans have become very popular, and just last month we've seen another shocking video that showed how people reacted to someone who was in serious trouble based solely on their appearance.
Watch DM Pranks' video below.
