Diffusion of Responsibility

In class last week, Sifu Freitag brought up an interesting concept. The concept was the bystander effect. She used the example of an argument that escalates to the point where someone needs to step in before someone is seriously hurt. She talked about how people are much less likely to jump in to help a victim when there are other people around because everyone is kind of looking to the individual next to them thinking "they will do something about it." There are many different factors that come into play in these situations, but it reminded me of something I read about recently called diffusion of responsibility.

There are many different choices we make every day. The choice to recycle, our choice of what we consume and purchase, the choice of how we treat the people around us, the choice of how we react to injustices etc.. The interesting thing is that diffusion of responsibility exists everywhere we look. We as a society have become okay with passing the responsibility of great choices and decision making onto others. We rely on politicians to make change in our country. We expect corporations to change our environment. And we also look to our peers for someone to take responsibility for our problems. It's so easy to dismiss your actions as unimportant. There's no way one person can make a difference. We're all looking for something or someone bigger to provoke the changes we want to see in the world.

Imagine if we all took responsibility for the role we play. Imagine if every person did everything we could for our neighbours, for our environment. I think we could live in a veritable utopia. It is very easy to pass responsibility onto our neighbours, but imagine what a difference we could make, if we all realized the power we have as individuals.

“In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.”
― C.G. Jung