Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about why bystanders help would be victims more often than we thought.

How you should think about past failures to avoid

future failures, and how crows passed an ancient test from Aesop's fables.

Let's set us fast in curiosity. A new surveillance footage study shows that bystanders help more often than we thought.

And the results of this research should bring comfort to any would-be victim.

This flies in the face of a story from 1964 that you may have heard if you've ever

taken a basic psychology class. It goes like this. In the New York City Borough of

Queens, a 28-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked in front of a large apartment building.

Reportedly, 38 witnesses stood by and did nothing.

Her story led to a flurry of studies that came to establish what's known as the bystander effect, which says

that the more witnesses there are to an incident, the less likely it is that any one of them

will step in and help.

There were a lot of factual errors with this story, like the fact that many bystanders actually did call the police.

But after the incident, study after study looked into how likely a person from a crowd of witnesses would be to step in and help.

And as a 1981 review of that research states, quote,

it is concluded that despite the diversity of styles, settings,

and techniques among the studies, the social inhibition of helping is a remarkably

consistent phenomenon. Victims are more likely to receive assistance when only a single

individual witnesses the emergency."

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