Comment Re:Filming people getting CPR (Score 1) 125
I think there are plenty of people who want to help, in principle. People also tend to get overwhelmed in a crisis situation and suffer extreme performance anxiety. It's not like we don't know that there are biological underpinnings for this. Consider the effects of epinephrine/adrenaline. It boosts some senses, making you more alert to danger while dulling sensations of physical pain, etc., priming you for fight or flight. However, it also compromises your higher cognitive abilities, memory, etc. PET scans have demonstrated drops in blood flow to areas of the brain handling those things. That is why people trained for emergency situations (EMTs, firefighters, soldiers, etc.) often drill and drill and drill and do so when possible in situations that are close to real emergencies as possible. Such training may reduce the level of epinephrine produced in such situations, or at least increase tolerance to it, while also converting the behaviors required in those situations from ones that require a lot of cognition to ones that are as close to natural instincts as possible. The simple fact is that most people don't have that kind of training and the average person, not very smart to start with, drops a hefty chunk of IQ points in a crisis.
That is only one reason people are bad in a crisis. I already mentioned the group dynamics issue where people in a group can often end up waiting for someone else to act so they can follow, lack confidence in their own abilities, etc., etc. There is also the concern about liability, etc. and an AC that replied to you also said pretty much exactly that in their post: that they had been burned before trying to help and now refuse to.