A suspected paedophile was lynched after the body of a four-year-old girl was found. The toddler had been raped and murdered.
The man in question was arrested in Reyes, northern Bolivia and put behind bars. However, the locals were not content with that particular course of action. Instead, they forced the bars of the jail open, beat the man in the street and then hanged him from a tree.
A video of the lynching has gone viral and this leads us to wonder - why do capital punishment videos get passed around so much? Does everyone have these morbid tendencies? There's a lot of us who would never click on anything like that at all - but arguably even more who would.
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Warning: Contains graphic content
Credit: CEN
The thing is, it would be easy to point the finger at the media and say if we didn't share these things, they wouldn't go viral. I know already that comments on this article will be heavily focused on the fact we've shared it, too. However, the media is often led by its audience, despite what many think.
Nilli Lavie, Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at University College London, told us: "The media may be able to take advantage of people's involuntary control over what they pay attention to. We have been able to show that when people are told to ignore graphic images, they are not able to. To some extent it is not in people's voluntary control. What we know is that the emotional value of an image will actively effect the level to which you pay attention to it.
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"We have established scientifically that when you have an image that targets a positive or negative response, it will be able to take your attention regardless of what it is."
Prof Lavie then explained that in one study she conducted, participants were shown images from a scientific inventory of pictorial stimuli of human faces, mutilated body parts and erotica. The response was exactly as they expected:
Prof Lavie said: "We instructed people to ignore the images and told them that paying attention to them will impair their task performance and we found that they could not ignore them, even though they were told to. When the image evokes an extreme emotional response, whether positive or negative, people will want to look at them."
If you're wondering what happened to the mob - no arrests have been made yet. However, police are currently questioning locals and using the social media videos that went viral to help find those responsible.
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Featured image credit: PA Images
Featured Image Credit:Topics: Paedophile, Death Penalty