I'm aware of the experiment to which you refer (which wasn't about bystander intervention but obedience to authority-figures, and what it demonstrated is by no means as simple and uncontested as you suggest) - my point was that invoking the name associated with a famous experiment is a bit of a lazy way of imagining you have offered a penetrating insight whilst actually demonstrating nothing in particular.
Fair. I was being lazy, and I don't know much about social psychology.
However, I was thinking of his work generally, rather than specifically the electoshock authority experiment. I did also mention the prison experiment, and a vague reference to the later work he did on social breaches. It was the latter I was thinking specifically related to what is going on in the OP's video.
There is an obvious reluctance to get involved in a physical confrontation because of fear for one's own physical safety (some of the interveners get a little too close too quickly for my liking - they could also have intervened verbally, for example "I am calling campus security!", and kept their distance)
My "penetrating insight" is that there are also at work sub-conscious, instinctive behavioural forces, which we all have inside us (in this case, the reluctance to commit a social breach and get involved in someone else's business). People are not as rational and clear of thinking as they like to imagine, in my opinion. And Stanley Milgram's experiments are the only experiments I am familiar with that show this clearly. You can hopefully educate me as to others.
From what I've read, the most famous obedience to authority experiment results are still reproducible today.
For what it's worth, I am not offering instinctive reactions or social psychology as an excuse for inaction. Rather the opposite - by being aware of our instincts, maybe we can guard against them leading us to do the "wrong" thing. I like to think the widespread knowledge of the obedience to authority experiment has made us all a little less blindly obedient.
