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Browsing University Scholarship by Author "Zionts, David"

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    Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity
    (Princeton University Press, 2013) Slovic, Paul; Zionts, David; Woods, Andrew K.; Goodman, Ryan; Jinks, Derek
    The twentieth century is often said to have been the bloodiest century in recorded history. In addition to its wars, it witnessed many grave and widespread human rights abuses. But what stands out in historical accounts of those abuses, perhaps even more than the cruelty of their perpetration, is the inaction of bystanders. Why do people and their governments repeatedly fail to react to genocide and other mass-scale human rights violations? There is no simple answer to this question. It is not because people are insensitive to the suffering of their fellow human beings-witness the extraordinary efforts an individual will expend to rescue a person in distress. It is not because people only care about identifiable victims of similar skin color who live nearby: witness the outpouring of aid from the north to the victims of the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Nor can the blame be apportioned entirely to political leaders. Although President George W. Bush was unresponsive to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur, it was his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, who ignored the genocide in Rwanda, and President Franldin D. Roosevelt who for too long did little to stop the Holocaust. The American example of inaction has been largely repeated in other countries as well. Behind every leader who ignored mass murder were millions of citizens whose indifference allowed the inaction to pass.