(Thumbnail Image: New York Post)

The video you're seeing shows a homeless man, stabbed after trying to save a woman from an attacker, dying on a street in Queens, New York. In the span of an hour and a half, more than 20 people walked past him, failing to help. The man died at the scene.

In an interview with The New York Times, a professor of psychology at Princeton University says you can blame the man's death on the failure of others to be the good samaritan that he tried to be.

"I'm afraid what we've got here is a situation of people failing to help, and the failure appears to be a moral failure. He did what you're supposed to do, and we let the person, who did what he was supposed to do, die."

But on Fox News, former prosecutor Joe Tacopina says people can't assume they'd be ready to help someone if they found themselves in a high-risk neighborhood in the early hours of the morning.

"We'd all like to think, 'if that were me,' I've heard people say 'if that were me I would have stopped and rendered aid and stayed with the person until the police get there.' I'd like to think I would do that. But in reality, at five in the morning, in Jamaica, Queens, which by the way is a high-crime area, we can't really expect people to do that. Again, should they? Yes. In reality, would they? No. They're going to put themselves in harm's way."

But a writer for True/Slant says any of the people wouldn't have had to get involved to help the dying man. Simply alerting the police would have been enough.

"The fact that dozens of people could pass this man by as a curiosity — after the crime had already been committed placing those observing in no personal danger — reveals something about people that is truly too horrible to contemplate. If they didn’t want to get involved, they could have simply made the call and then left."

A psychologist on ABC's "Good Morning America" says the reason people didn't help him is because in American society, people are so used to violence, they don't know what to do once they actually see it.  

"The part that really scares the heck out of us in the psychology business is this desensitization to violence that we're seeing in incredible amounts and very powerful ways in this culture. I think that's most of what we saw in this terrible video."

"We love violence in this culture. We just love the stuff, so we just have this 24/7 pounding of violence in our movies, in our videos, in our music and certainly in the games. We now know that pounding of violence causes brain changes where people start to not distinguish between real violence and cyber violence."

So what's really to blame here? What would you have done?

For more video on the struggles of the homeless, check out the related videos section at the bottom of the transcript.

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