Bystander Effect

The Street by Baltus

Here is a famous painting by Baltus who is French, 1908-2001 (it is available to see at MoMA in NY). Although at first glance it looks like just a beautiful painting, there is something wrong to happen in the painting. On the left side, the man is doing sexual aggression to the girl wearing a red cloth, but none of the people seem to notice it (or I guess they pretend not to).

This is a good example for the bystander effect (the large number of people witnessing the tragedies militated against anyone's helping). The reason that it occurs is that the people assume as the reasonableness and appropriateness of not helping by the other people do not help. In the above case, if we do not know what the man is doing, we may assume that is appropriate or even may not notice the weirdness.

The New Japanese President

The above graph shows GDP growth rate of UK (red line), JPN (green line), and US (purple line as a bench mark for global economy) between 1961 and 2010. In addition, red and green arrows indicate the succession of both Britain's and Japan's prime minister, respectively.

As you can see, the Japanese prime ministers change more frequently than those of UK. According to research on the managerial succession, there are two things regarding top management's changes. One is that poor performance in a firm is more likely to lead a leader to change than good performance. The other is that the more often a manager and CEO in a firm change, the poorer the firm's performance is.

As long as I can see the above graph, I think those facts may apply to this case (though I have not conducted a statistical test to the relationship between the turnover and GDP growth). If the relationship is true, what I expect the new Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda,  is to be in office as long as possible.

Even as one of the Japanese, I cannot remember the name of the prime minister anymore.