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Discord Invitation

20th April 2014

Post with 7 notes

Exapting the Diffusion of Responsbility

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Sociologists have identified a phenomenon known as the diffusion of responsibility, according to which individuals are less likely to provide assistance when they are part of a crowd of bystanders as compared to the likelihood of an individual to provide assistance to another in distress if no one else is present.

Usually when we think of the diffusion of responsibility we think of the “bystander effect,” as in the Kitty Genovese case, when multiple bystanders fail to come to the aid of an individual in distress. Here no one takes responsibility, but another kind of diffusion of responsibility is when everyone takes responsibility. In the film version of The Handmaid’s Tale (I haven’t read the book) there is a scene where all the handmaids must collectively pull on a rope in order that they all participate in a hanging of one of their own.

It is not at all unusual for social institutions to engage in the engineering of this second kind of diffusion of responsibility, when everyone is made to feel guilty, especially when the engineering of the diffusion of responsibility can be employed to shift blame away from a powerful individual or a dysfunctional institution onto those who had little or no choice about participating in the institution in question.

Someone in a position of responsibility and authority, who is supposed to make a decision, may surround themselves with others so as to make use of the diffusion of responsibility in order either to avoid taking action or to shift blame for their bad decisions onto a collective body, proactively creating the conditions under which the diffusion of responsibility will prevail – to their advantage.

Meetings are an excellent venue in which to do this. Under the guise of seeking advice or “brainstorming” one can deflect attention from one’s own role as the responsible authority and draw others in on the pretext of soliciting their input, only to hijack this participation to diffuse responsibility. 

As long as you can maintain a critical mass of persons around yourself, even after a failure of responsibility, when the responsible party ought to be held to account, a sufficient number of persons present can generate finger-pointing, charges, and counter-charges sufficient to muddy the waters and to allow the opportunistic individual to avoid responsibility as needed.

I am not suggesting that this is always done consciously. In fact, it usually happens without being noticed by the perpetrator. We all know people with a natural penchant for manipulation, who have no need of calculation because of the intuitive cunning that they possess. When we realize that we have encountered such an individual we usually take pains to separate ourselves from them, but in the workplace this is not always possible.

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Tagged: sociologydiffusion of responsibilityexaptationbystander effect

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