diffusion of responsibility

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a social psychological mechanism in which an individual feels less personal responsibility for taking action — or for the consequences of inaction — when other people are present who could also act, because responsibility is perceived to be shared across all potential actors rather than concentrated on any single person; diffusion of responsibility was identified by Darley and Latané as a key explanation of the bystander effect, in which the presence of multiple witnesses to an emergency reduces the likelihood that any individual will intervene; the phenomenon has broader applications beyond emergency helping, including collective moral disengagement in organisations where responsibility for harmful outcomes is distributed across many individuals who each feel they bear only a small share; diffusion of responsibility is particularly acute in large anonymous groups, in hierarchical organisations where decisions are divided across roles, and in online environments where the scale of audiences makes individual responsibility feel vanishingly small; it has been studied in the context of corporate wrongdoing, military atrocities, online harassment, and failures of regulatory oversight