Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Bill, thanks for your many clarifications.
I apologize for my crappy memory.
Two weeks ago, we were sitting around a family party chatting and
watching two little kids roughhousing. They were behaving just on the
edge of dangerous, and any one of the adults in the room would have
been seen as authorized by the others to rein them in, including two
parents, two grandparents of the younger child, one parent and
various aunts and uncles of the older child. In a millisecond, the
older child was down with a badly broken upper arm. Required pins,
surgery, the whole nine yards.
There was not an adult in that room who did not report that she or he
would have stopped the kids long before if other adults had not been
there. This was not said in an exculpatory way by anybody. Nobody
took blame in this case as a zero sum game. We we did seem to feel,
rightly or wrongly, that social groups have a certain viscosity that
we felt restrained within a membrane of group inaction.
One of the serious witnesses of the Kitty Genovese murder was going to
call the police,
but his wife said, "don't bother - they must have had 30 calls by now",
though that's
a different situation from having imperfect information. Obviously the
parents in a circle
all had pretty much the same information. On the kids, typically we
default to the parents
as figuring out if things are okay, though I'm a weirdo in that respect
in that I more often
step in to situations where the parents themselves have checked out
mentally.
(I do see parents often abrogating responsibility once their kids are in
a group, and
it's not every parent who'll automatically fill in as surrogate parent
for other kids in
such a group situation).
Past history plays a part as well - if kids always play like that and
nothing happens,
you draw the conclusion that nothing will happen. And then weird things
do occur -
one daughter pushed the other off a swing 1 1/2 feet above slightly hard
sand and she
broke her upper arm. Go figure.
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
