A rescuer’s personal identification with victims can suspend in-group loyalty to countrymen

Evidence

“The only help they’ll get is a hand grenade.” Thompson lowered his helicopter into the line of fire and commanded his gunner to fire on his approaching countrymen if they tried to harm the family. He radioed the accompanying gunships for help, and together they airlifted the remaining dozen villagers to safety. He flew back to the irrigation ditch, where they found and rescued a two-year-old boy still clinging to his dead mother. Thompson described his empathetic human linkage: “I had a son at home about the same age.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 656

Categorization

• XREF: Thompson’s overt threat to fire on his own countrymen answers the vault’s question about where the loyalty boundary actually sits — kinship with a toddler in Vietnam outweighed uniformed allegiance. — connects to: Rescue behavior often begins from helping someone personally known — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 179
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 656