14 DAY TRIAL // The reason why people prefer to witness something bad happening rather than interfering to help is partially that they fear what others will think. They consider that individuals watching the scene will think worst of them if the outcome is bad, than if they simply stood and watched.
Scientists have no way of knowing whether this type of behavior is something that humankind developed during the past century, or if it's a genetic trait passed on from generation to generation.
Engaging in a behavior that would actively change the outcome of a situation is something that most fear today. They think that people will judge them worst of all if they somehow make a mistake.
It's no longer a matter of whether the person had good intentions or not. The outcome is the most important, and somehow people started fearing they may do more harm than good by helping.
“Omissions and commissions come up relatively frequently in everyday life, and we sometimes puzzle over them,” explains the co-leader of the new study, Brandeis University moral psychologist Peter DeScioli.
“If a cashier gives you an extra $20 bill at the register, some people think it’s OK to keep the money, but many of those people would never just swipe the twenty if the cashier wasn’t looking,” he adds.
Other study authors are University of Pennsylvania experts John Christner and Robert Kurzban.
Omission is defined here as not giving the bill back, whereas commission means actively seeking to deceive the cashier into stealing the bill. But the scientists believed that this established view on the whole thing was wrong, and that a new idea was in order.
They propose that people in fact formulate their strategies based on how they think other will judge them afterwards. The team set up an experiment to prove this, in which a “taker,” a cashier and an observer (at times) were involved.
Whenever takers were given the possibility to take the money without being seen by an observer, they did so 51 percent of the time. Only 28 percent of them let a timer set by the experts to run out without an external observer.
These differences indicate that people prefer not being judged by others. In fact, they may even fear it. So, even if the harm done by omission is greater than that done by commission, individuals tend to select the first strategy of behavior, PsychCentral reports.