Since I wrote my comment I had lots of chances to prod at the apathy of people to act against imminent horrible doom.
I do believe that a large obstacle it’s that going “well, maybe I should do something about it, then. Let’s actually do that” requires a sudden level of mental effort and responsibility that’s… well, it’s not quite as unlikely as oxygen turning into gold, but you shouldn’t just expect people doing that (it took me a ridiculous amount of time before starting to do so).
People are going to require a lot of prodding or an environment where taking personal responsibility for a collective crisis is the social norm to get moving. 10 millions would cont as lot of prodding, yeah. 100k… eh, I’d guess lots of people would still jump at that, but not many of those who are paid the same amount or more.
So a calculation like “I can enjoy my life more by doing nothing, lots of other people can try to save the world in my place” might be involved, even if not explicitly. It’s a mixture of the Tragedy of the Commons and of Bystander Apathy, two psychological mechanism with plenty of literature.
The cure for bystander apathy is getting one person to lead by example. Since in this case there are several prominent such examples, a Tragedy of the Commons scenario seems more likely to me.
You are right, it’s not possible to tell if this happens implicitly or explicitly (in which case there is nothing to be done anyway).
Since I wrote my comment I had lots of chances to prod at the apathy of people to act against imminent horrible doom.
I do believe that a large obstacle it’s that going “well, maybe I should do something about it, then. Let’s actually do that” requires a sudden level of mental effort and responsibility that’s… well, it’s not quite as unlikely as oxygen turning into gold, but you shouldn’t just expect people doing that (it took me a ridiculous amount of time before starting to do so).
People are going to require a lot of prodding or an environment where taking personal responsibility for a collective crisis is the social norm to get moving. 10 millions would cont as lot of prodding, yeah. 100k… eh, I’d guess lots of people would still jump at that, but not many of those who are paid the same amount or more.
So a calculation like “I can enjoy my life more by doing nothing, lots of other people can try to save the world in my place” might be involved, even if not explicitly. It’s a mixture of the Tragedy of the Commons and of Bystander Apathy, two psychological mechanism with plenty of literature.
The cure for bystander apathy is getting one person to lead by example. Since in this case there are several prominent such examples, a Tragedy of the Commons scenario seems more likely to me.
You are right, it’s not possible to tell if this happens implicitly or explicitly (in which case there is nothing to be done anyway).