"Someone Else Will Do It."

In 1913, an engineer named Max Ringelmann noticed something weird about human behavior. When you told one person to do something like pull a rope, they tried really hard. When you put them into groups, they didn't try as hard.

They slacked.

Psychologists have identified this behavior as social loafing. Sometimes they also call it diffusion of responsibility, defined as "the idea that the presence of others changes the behavior of the individual by making them feel less responsible for the consequences of their actions," leading to "moral disengagement."

A 2005 study confirmed that when you put people into teams, each person does less, with the exception of highly motivated individuals, who wind up doing most of the work. If you were ever the team leader or facilitator, you know all about social loafing.

It happens online, too.

A 2022 review on diffusion of responsibility revealed that it happens all the time, in situations ranging from donations to tipping. It even happens in online communication. If you email one person, they're more likely to respond. They also give longer, more detailed responses. If you email a bunch of people, and they see each other copied on the message, they don't respond at all or they send shorter, less helpful replies.

Groups also make riskier decisions than individuals.

A team of psychologists asked a bunch of adults to play with marbles. They put them into pairs. Each pair's job was to stop the marble from sliding down a ramp. They won points if they stopped the marble before it hit the bottom. They got more points if their partner stopped it before they did. As predicted, both players got worse over time. As the study concludes, "The co-player's presence led participants to act later, reduced their subjective sense of agency, and also attenuated the neural processing of action outcomes." Basically, it made them slower and dumber.

In 1968, two psychologists wanted to see what adults would do in an emergency when they were alone, versus when they were in a group. They started pumping fake smoke into a room while people filled out a questionnaire. When they were on their own, 75 percent of participants did something. When they were in a group, the dynamic almost completely reversed. More than 60 percent of them did nothing. They just kept working on the questionnaire.

When the researchers asked why, participants said they didn't want to look stressed or anxious. They figured if nobody else was doing anything, then there was nothing wrong. They figured they were just overreacting. They cared more about looking weird than letting the building burn down.

That's called pluralistic ignorance.

You see similar results in studies over the last several decades. On their own, people generally take more responsibility.

There's nobody else to do it.

When you put them into groups, they start acting selfish and stupid. They look to each other for validation first. If they don't get any signals to act, then they'll ignore what their own eyes are telling them. The more people you add to a situation, the more passive they become, the less likely they jump into action.

About a decade after the smoke study, another team of psychologists ran a similar experiment, but this time it was a man beating a woman in public. Participants intervened when they thought the man was a stranger. When they thought the man was her husband, they didn't do anything. That's called confusion of responsibility, when bystanders think it's not their place to step in or step up to help, or they're afraid helping will get them into trouble with some kind of authority figure.

A 2018 study looked at the brain's natural response to emergencies. They observed a significant drop in the central gyrus and the prefrontal cortex, the parts of your brain associated with helping. A person's first reaction is to preserve themselves. Their brain has to cross an empathy or compassion threshold in order to risk their own safety and security by helping someone. Basically, they have to care more about the person in danger than themselves.

A 2019 study in Aggressive Behavior found that friends and family members help each other when strangers don't. In fact, knowing the person makes you roughly 20 times more likely to help. Flip that, and you see that if someone doesn't know you, they're 20 times less likely to get involved.

Saturation also plays a role.

When you add more people to a situation, there's less for them to do. At least, that's what they usually think. If someone's already helping, then bystanders are less likely to get involved.

The gravity of an emergency also makes a difference. Basically, an emergency has to look bad enough to get someone's attention, but not so bad that it triggers their self-protection instincts.

You can see why this setup poses a problem when it comes to a crisis that falls way above or way below that threshold.

The climate crisis and the pandemicene hit us right in the middle of the bystander effect, exploiting pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility. It's exactly the kind of problem everyone wants someone else to do something about.

The super rich grasp this vulnerability, at least intuitively.

So do politicians.

They're perfectly happy to profit off our deaths and the destruction of our future while everyone stands around waiting for someone else to make the hard decisions, for someone else to make the personal sacrifices, for someone else to deal with the problem. Even worse, they use the inaction they see as an excuse for them to do nothing. After all, why should Monica give up her carbon bomb vacation when Heather is going to Italy?

As we've observed time and again, everyone reinforces each other's anxiety about looking weird if they're the only ones doing the right thing. They would rather sabotage their own health than violate social codes.

Some research has pushed back on the bystander effect, showing that people do tend to offer help even when they're in a crowd. However, the Aggressive Behavior study shows this likely happens because of accountability cues. In other words, they act because there's a camera present of some kind or some other indication that there's going to be consequences for not helping. That's why they help.

They don't want to look bad.

Here's the strangest part:

Most people know about the diffusion of social responsibility, along with terms like social loafing and pluralistic ignorance. If they don't, they've heard the story of Kitty Genovese, even if it's exaggerated. We have countless examples of societies allowing moral crime and social murder to happen right in front of them, simply because their membership in society itself encouraged their silence and complicity.

They know all this, but they still decide to stay silent and complicit when it's happening right in front of them.

Maybe psychologists should study that.

Even when people know about these psychological and sociological hangups, they still choose to dwell in denial and wishful thinking. They tell themselves it's different this time, or there's some kind of exception to excuse it. They still choose to stand around and wait for someone else to do the right thing, until it's too late. They're really good at admitting fault and promising to do better after the fact, especially when they can fall back on a diffusion of responsibility as the reason.

Then they wait for everyone to forget.

Rinse and repeat.

It's ironic that we keep talking about society and community as something that calls on us to summon our better selves and help each other, when our actions continue to prove that group behavior often leads us to making bad decisions and indulging in our worst selves.

Simply being in a community isn't enough.

You have to do something.

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