Seeing fellow humans as needing help can break through moral disengagement

Evidence

The transformative power of humanization is graphically illustrated by the actions of one man during a military massacre in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War (Zganjar, 1998). An American platoon led by Lieutenant William Calley had killed about 500 Vietnamese women, children, and elderly men in the village of My Lai. … He spotted an injured girl, marked her location with a smoke signal, and radioed for help. To his horror, he saw a soldier flip her over and spray her with a burst of machine-gun fire. When he saw bodies of the villagers heaped in an irrigation ditch and soldiers firing into them, he realized that he was watching a massacre. … Thompson was moved to moral action by the sight of a terrified woman with a baby in her arms and a frightened child clinging to her leg. He described his sense of common humanity: “These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 652

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This is the counter-example in the humanization process chapter - the single man who refused to disengage at My Lai - directly useful as the moral-action complement to the sacrificial and dehumanization mechanisms.
• DEEPTHINKING: Thompson’s refusal to disengage despite being surrounded by a whole platoon’s collective moral disengagement raises the question of what individual trait or situational factor makes some resist - the chapter sets up this as the closing puzzle.
• XREF: connects to: Moral disengagement from in-group wrongdoing can be countered through awareness-raising communications. — Sonia Roccas and Yechiel Klar and Ido Liviatan, The Paradox of Group-Based Guilt: Modes…, 136; Andean corazonar concept treats others’ suffering as one’s own motivation to act — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 1393