The importance of appearances – this is the title of the video below, in which French activists perform a social experiment: two men pretend to faint on a busy street in Paris.
The first man has the appearance of a homeless person. When he asks for help, nobody seems to care – minutes pass while people keep walking by him without paying attention, let alone attempting to help him in some way. In the next scene, the other man is shown, who is dressed in a suit. As he keels over, he doesn’t even need to ask for help before people rush to his aid.
It is not possible to tell whether the experiment has any real sociographic value; nevertheless, the recording is very thought-provoking.
What if it happens to you?
The idea for the experiment sprung from an incident that happened in 2008 in the waiting room of a New York hospital: a poor looking woman fainted, and the personnel of the hospital didn’t give her any assistance for a full 45 minutes. By the time someone decided to help her, it was too late.