Are you a moral rebel?
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"Broadening how we think about ourselves and our connections to others can help us overcome the firmly engrained human tendency towards inaction."
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The Bystander Effect by Catherine. A Sanderson posed many interesting questions and centered on an interesting topic. I'd heard of some of the studies before but wasn't entirely familiar with the phenomena. The concept is basically that good people or bad people look on as people do bad things without speaking out.
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The topic was interesting and I think important, however I felt that the execution was lacking. Sanderson details a lot of studies, but I found that she didn't really go into details about the scale of the studies, and alternative factors that could influence individuals. For example sexism in the workplace, Sanderson didn't really engage with the considerations surrounding gender inequality and how this may play in. I felt like the writing style lacked cohesion between the studies and Sanderson's ideas and this made it disjointed at times.
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The strength of the work lay in the final chapter where Sanderson identified actions that people can take. Her focus on people actively making small statements to themselves, people in leadership roles taking action like coaches talking to their players, and people focusing on connections to wider groups of society to feel empathy with people. I feel that the book would have benefited from Sanderson's thoughts more coherently throughout and a more nuanced examination of the studies. The focus of her work was mostly on the USA so I think it would be interesting to see how this concept works outside the US.
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I received a gifted copy in exchange for an honest review from Tandem Collective and Harper Collins.