Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. ― Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1964 a young woman was raped and murdered in New York while dozens of neighbours looked on but did not come into action to help her
In 2018, in Jehanabad, Bihar, a group of men molested a minor girl in broad daylight, while the people who had gathered around the scene did nothing to help her. Some even took videos of the incident, which then went viral.
18-year-old Samyukhtha Sunil was one among many women harassed during the infamous 2017 New Year’s Eve incident in Bengaluru on Brigade Road but nobody helped her.
Thousands of years of human civilization have passed, but these terrifying news still overwhelm the world. Plenty of campaigns about social and natural problems have been and are being taught all over the world. Every problem seems to be solved with a different solution. But if we are aware, one thing can actually change everything. And that one thing is human ignorance.
As human beings, we are all destined to have a degree of natural empathy or the ability to understand what another person is thinking and feeling based on rules for how one should think or feel. There is a positive correlation between feeling empathetic and being willing to help others. If so, then why do we still need to campaign human rights? Or social awareness? Is caring about other people not already embedded in our nature?
The Facts Betray The Fate
Furthermore, the debate concerning whether the impulse to help is based in altruism or self-interest still remains. In fact, the world is still witnessing global-scale disasters. The world is threatened by climate crisis and racism, slaughters in the Middle East, and the disheartening amount of hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite other causes, these disasters are fundamentally caused by the pluralistic ignorance of humans. If Martin Luther King did not lead the demonstration on the street for the 1960’s America's segregation policy, or if the French and American stayed silent on King Louis XIII’s absolutism and British’s tax discrimination, our history books would have a completely different story.
In a classic research, O’Gorman (1975) shows that the majority of whites in the U.S. in 1968 did not favor segregation. However, about half of them believed that the majority of whites did favor segregation; and those who overestimated support for segregation were more willing to support housing policies that allowed others to segregate. What he studied is known as pluralistic ignorance, a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but go along with it because they assume, incorrectly, that most others accept it.
As an example, imagine we are sitting in a large lecture hall listening to an especially complicated lecture. Then, the lecturer pauses and asks if there are any questions. No hands go up, and we wonder whether these people truly understood what the lecturer is talking about and we feel completely lost. The fear of looking confused keeps us from raising our hand, but as we look around the room at our impassive classmates, we interpret their similar behavior differently. We take their failure to raise their hands as a sign that they have understood lecture perfectly and that they genuinely have no question.
Cause and Effect
A lot of factors influence people’s behaviors such as the environment, other people, and the media. Whenever people decide to constantly be silent as a reaction to crime, deviances, and many others, sooner or later it will be seen as a normal phenomenon. This is what psychologists call the normalization process, in this case being tolerant with deviances. Then, what is the mechanism in which this process takes place?
Let’s take a look at how the process of normalization has taken place in Indonesia. Recently, an online prostitution suspect said “don't be pretentious” as a way to defend herself from social judgement. Some suspects of drugs claim that it is the best solution to relieve their stress. Not giving any effort to reduce it, some influencers still trigger people to being ignorant. As a result, their influences have induced some people to start consider cheating during an exam, corruption in the bureaucracy, online prostitution, bribing for driving license, and even violating driving signs as normal actions.