When I worked in health care, I had to get CPR training. Now, if you’ve never done CPR training before, basically you show up at a conference room with a bunch of slightly-too-realistic dummies. The instructor walks you through the steps and eventually sets everyone to practicing. What follows is normally acoustic chaos; lots of people yelling “ARE YOU ALRIGHT?”, the oddly specific sound of plastic getting bent repeatedly, and frequently the not-so-quiet mutterings of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.” All that noise is part of the process actually—yelling “are you alright?” is part of assessing someone’s consciousness, chest compressions normally do make odd noises since in real life since you’re frequently breaking ribs, and “Staying Alive” has a beat very similar to the target 100-120 compressions per minute. But there was one yell that really drew my attention because of how specific it was. Right after determining a person to be unresponsive we were instructed to: point at someone, make eye contact, tell them to call 911. Simply saying, “call 911” wasn’t enough. We had to put responsibility on a single person to make the call. The medical world has learned through experience that groups don’t take well to instructions and that individuals need specific directions under pressure. This is exactly where the psychological concept of diffusion of responsibility comes in.
Diffusion of responsibility is the phenomenon that people spread responsibility amongst others, lessening their own individual, personal sense of responsibility. Ever heard of the bystander effect? It normally comes up when newspapers write about how someone bled out on a busy sidewalk for hours without anyone calling for help, or someone falling onto the subway line and nobody moves to assist. When presented with an ambiguous or unfamiliar situation, people tend to assume there are other, more qualified or knowledgeable people than themselves so, rather than risk getting in the way or being wrong, people tend to stay on the sidelines (Latane & Darely, 1968). ‘That’s all well and good Ian,’ you might say, ‘but these are all fairly dramatic life and death situations. Of course some healthy caution is appropriate in normal life.’ You’re right, astute reader, though the implications of diffusion of responsibility also slip into more personal territory.
Discussing and building consensus before making big risk-payoff decisions on a project? Why not, it sounds irresponsible even to make such decisions without first getting the team behind it, right? One of the first major research papers on this topic examined exactly this. Discussions and consensus concerning risks/payoffs decisions actually led to greater risk-taking than without discussion or consensus. Why? Because people could spread responsibility amongst the group and not on themselves. Riskier decisions become less personally consequential when it’s not just you on the line (Wallach, Kogan, & Bem, 1964).
The idea that, with the presence of others, individuals can remove themselves from blame is a common one. It turns up everywhere from interpreting emergencies (Darley & Latane, 1968), to why adult children are less likely to care for their parents when residential care beds are widely available (Van den Broek & Dykstra, 2017), to even why STEM education reform is so disjointed (in this case, because the aggregate success of STEM initiatives masks the individual drive for discipline-specific reform; Martin & North, 2014). Another big distinction is that people not only tend to assume less responsibility for a failed group endeavor, but they also put less effort into group projects than if they were working by themselves (Mynatt & Sherman, 1975; Petty et al., 1977). Have you ever visited someone for lunch and, when asked where you want to go, reply with (that most hated response), “I don’t know?” Yup, diffusion of responsibility. We’re quite a self-serving bunch!
I talk about all of this not to say that everyone is a bunch of gutless lemmings. There are some grains of wisdom here. We’re generally happy to release responsibility to others, particularly for the sake of distancing ourselves from negative outcomes. We’re protective of our sense of self, dignity, and social status. Our tendency to operate as such highlights how important it is to consider how we approach working with, and within, groups. Keeping team members involved, invested, and valued in a group project is not something that just happens. It requires effort to build and sustain those qualities because, if anything, we naturally pass the hot potato to someone else when we don’t see our place in things. We need to emphasize the importance of individuals and appreciate the efforts of those who do step up to the plate when nobody else will. Albert Bandura, one of the eminent scholars of psychology, famously noted that diffusion of responsibility is one pathway in separating moral self-regulation from inhumane conduct—that we can so easily disavow our own participation in harming others is a big moral challenge (2002). Diffusion of responsibility is a challenge that encompasses not just our work, but also the way we live our lives with and amidst each other. So the next time you find yourself in a position thinking, “Well that’s not my job,” I challenge you to think again.
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References
Albert Bandura (2002) Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency, Journal of Moral Education, 31:2, 101-119. doi: 10.1080/0305724022014322
Darley, J. M., & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4, Pt.1), 377-383. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0025589
Latane, B., & Darley, J. M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3), 215-221. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0026570
Mynatt, C., & Sherman, S. J. (1975). Responsibility attribution in groups and individuals: A direct test of the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(6), 1111-1118. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.6.1111
Petty, R.E., Harkins, S.G., Williams, K.D., Latane, B. (1977). The effects of group size on cognitive effort and evaluation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3(4), 579-582. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/014616727700300406
Rushton, G.T., Ray, H.E., Criswell, B.A., Polizzi, S.J., Bearss, C.L., Levelsmier, N., Chhita, H., Kirchhoff, M. (2014). Stemming the diffusion of responsibility: A longitudinal case study of America’s chemistry teachers. Educational Researcher, 43(8), 390-403.
Van den Broek, T., & Dykstra, P.A. (2017). Residential care and care to community-dwelling parents: Out-selection, in-selection and diffusion of responsibility. Ageing and Society, 37(8), 1609-1631. doi:10.1017/S0144686X16000519
Wallach, M. A., Kogan, N., & Bem, D. J. (1964). Diffusion of responsibility and level of risk taking in groups. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 68(3), 263-274. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0042190
