Setting A Good Example

Maria Konnikova looks at To Kill A Mockingbird, and some famous studies of people being immoral, cruel or indifferent to the suffering of others, and comes away with a little bit of positivity:

In Milgram’s experiments of obedience, there were the few who refused to follow orders. Flat-out refused. They would not shock. They would not punish. They would not participate. They looked Milgram in the face, and said, not for me (and things that were not quite as nice as well). In Zimbardo’s prison study, not every guard became a sadistic torturer. In fact, there were three different types of guards: those who followed the rules, those who broke the rules to give the prisoners small breaks and favors and never punished them—and then, the brutal, hostile ones that tend to get all of the press.
In Kitty Genovese’s case, true, no one called the police. But one thing that is not often mentioned when discussing the bystander effect is that a single dissenting individual can be all it takes to tip a group to an entirely different reaction. One strong person is enough to break group conformity. It can happen on the smallest of levels, as with Solomon Asch’s famous study of social conformity, where a participant would go against his own eyes to conform with a group’s judgment of the length of a line—unless there existed a single other individual who would back him up, in which case, the conformity effect evaporated.
And it happens all the time on the most real levels, where people put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of perfect strangers. In fact, if you were to talk to Philip Zimbardo these days, you would hear that he is studying just that: the hero effect. Far from toppling his faith in humanity, the Stanford prison study made him understand that people are capable of being tipped toward good just as they are of heading in the opposite direction—and that the right training (here, I think of Atticus’s many words of advice to Scout) can play an important part in tipping that balance.

A good example goes a long way.  Sure, we can be terrible people, but oftentimes, people are amazingly good.  If somebody does the right thing or the wrong thing, others will follow.  That's an important idea to keep in mind.