Diffusion of responsibility

Posted by Winnie Melda on February 20th, 2019

Explanation of the Scenario

I had a container of water in hand, and I kept slipping and falling intentionally on several occasions of bystanders. I did it thrice when I was both in a group of three and when I was in a group of over ten people. I was to find out the effect of help accorded to me depending on the group of bystanders that were present in this situation. I discovered that in a group composed of more than ten people; there were few people that offered the help to me while, in the groups of three two subjects, almost all of them offered help. In the first time, the number of people that came to the rescue was many compared to the number of people that attended to me in the subsequent fake falls. The reason to that I think is because they became used and realized that I was doing it intentionally. In the first case, nobody could recognize that I did it intentionally, and that was why there was a high percentage of subjects helping me.

The bystander effect as observed

The case for many people in the group and only a few helping is because each of them thought that another would help, and so few ended up helping in the long run. When there were few subjects present, a good percentage came for my help because they knew there were not so many people around to help. The other groups composed of many people also failed to help because of each feared others looking at him or her, while the case of small group had few people, and hence none could fear. That means that when there were many people present the subjects present felt a less individual or personal responsibility to help or to take action. That scenario helped me to understand more the diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect. 

Support of the answer from research publications

According to Darley and Latane (1968), there are different reactions to take action between various groups of people and the smaller the group, the higher the responsibility to take action. The reactions of individuals are because of the effect of social influence that says, when a person’s behavior changes because of the presence of others, we call it social influence. Social influence played a big role in my case according to these writers. The social influence supports the theory of diffusion of responsibility that says that when the number of people in a group increases, the subject feels less personal of individual responsibility to carry out an action. When somebody is in a group of two or three people, he/she assumes that someone else can handle the problem.  It is also worth to note that it is not the responsibility of for helping shared when others are present, but it is also the potential blame or guilt for not helping.

If you are the only person present in an emergency; the consequences of not helping someone are much greater than if others are present to bear the burden of nonintervention (Garcia et al., 2002). The other thing pointed out by social psychologists is that one of the reasons that we fail to help when in a group of many people is because we are afraid of an embarrassment of ridicule. Imagine how you stupid you may feel when you spring to aid somebody who did not want or need your help! These publications, therefore, support my observation and argument.

References

Garcia, S., Weaver, K, Darley, J. & Moskowitz, G. (2002). Crowded minds: The implicit bystander effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 843-853.

Latane, B. & Darley, M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10, 215-22l.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in custom essay paper writing if you need a similar paper you can place your order from custom research paper services.