Radical Kindness

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. In April 2017, a woman hurried to step off a subway train in the Bronx just as the doors were closing. New Yorkers pull off such near escapes every day, but this passenger was not so lucky. The subway doors pinned her in place. Half in, half out of the car.

What happened next was deeply unnerving. It wasn't that the subway train started moving, with one of its doors partially open, the train was not going to leave the station. No, the shocking thing, visible in a cell phone video recorded at the scene, was the sight of people walking past the trapped woman. The woman was walking off the train when the doors closed on her and no one walking by seems to notice or care.

Instead of helping, one witness recorded it. Once the video went viral, horrified reactions poured in. Like how could somebody just pass by that? People just caught in their own head and they want to do their own thing, like, you know, I don't have time, you know. What did that say about New Yorkers?

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