People are not likely to help when faced with an emergency. Are they all heartless or is something else going on? Science reveals that we can explain this lack of helping behavior by the Bystander effect and that there are ways to decrease this effect. It was a busy Monday night in Café Moto in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Cars were passing by and more guests entered the restaurant. The restaurant seats 35 people, but it was more crowded than that. The guests were enjoying their dinner in the vintage style restaurant, and the lamb ribs, mussels, and fresh baked cake were particularly popular...

Almost every single day you hear and read terrifying news about violence. A football team kicks the arbiter to death (Mohamed, 2013), two teenagers beat up a 14-year-old boy (Lai, 2012), and a 17-year-old boy is stabbed to death (Mercer, 2013), to name just a few. With all this media attention on violence, it’s not strange that most people believe our world today is more dangerous than ever. Indeed, most people believe violence has increased the past decades. However, believe it or not, research shows there is actually a decline in violence. In his book, Pinker (2011) shows that European...