In my home country, there was the time that the number of robberies increased rapidly. People became very cautious whenever they needed to go out. The government told everybody to avoid walking on deserted roads. Unfortunately, my friend was one of the victims of the robbers. What made her more frustrated than being robbed was the fact that she was in the middle of the most crowded street in the city, but no one offered her any help. They all stood around her and watched the robber leaving without any actions. This is a typical example of a rule that is well-known by social psychologists: the greater number of people present, the less likely they will help. In the other words, if a person perceives himself as one of the possible helpers, he will be likely to hold back and see if someone else would step forward. In chapter four of Lauren Slater’s Opening Skinner’s Box book, “In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing”, she explains the role of this rule in the case of Kitty Genovese. Kitty was the woman who was stabbed numerous times to death over the course of 35 minutes. There were 38 people who could hear what was happening, however, no one took action. Slater also writes about other experiments established by John Darley and Bib Latane, which mimicked Kitty’s case in a way that nobody would get harmed, to see how people react if they are in a group and a person is in need of help. Are humans really innately heartless and cruel? There is one experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram, who discusses in his article The Perils of Obedience the effect of obedience on people’s cruel actions. Many people think that if a person involve in a situation where others need help but he does not do anything, he must be cruel. However, it is not always the case. I do not believe that cruelty is human nature, but people act cruelly under some circumstances, because they are obedient to an authority figure or try not to take responsibility when other people are around. Obedience is one of the reasons that can make a person behave ruthlessly. It is a basic element in the structure of society. To test if people would go against their moral beliefs to obey an authority figure’s command, Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University. In that experiment, there were two people involved: a “learner” and a “teacher”. The teacher was a naive subject who was told that the purpose of the experiment was to find out the effect of punishment on a person’s learning ability. The learner was strapped into a chair with eletronode on his wrist. He is told to memorize a list of word pairs and would be tested by answering the second word when he heard the first word of a pair. The teacher’s duty was to read the first word, and if the learner made a mistake, the teacher would apply a voltage shock whose intensity increased with the number of wrong answers. The learner was actually an actor, so there was no pain involved. As the