Diffusion of Responsibility

On Thursday, our discussion of Foucault lead to a deeper conversation of responsibility. Foucault's belief is that everything is everyone's responsibility because it is your community. This lead to a discussion of whether starvation in Africa is our responsibility because we are aware of it. This was interesting because our discussion turned to defending why we are not responsible for these situations. I thought that one of the most interesting questions that was brought up was why we are more invested on showing why we are not responsible than why we are. As said in class, I think it is because people to not want to have to feel blame or guilt if something goes wrong in what they have taken responsibility for if they are in a group setting. However, if one is alone and something goes wrong, they are more willing to take responsibility because it is obvious that they are the only ones who can fix the situation. This "diffusion of responsibility" concept reminded me of videos that I had seen in psychology. In the video, psychologists set up two different cases of smoke coming through a door. In one case they had one individual witness the smoke while they were taking a test, and in the other a group of individuals witnessed the smoke. It was interesting because in most cases the individual would respond by getting help, but in the cases with a group of individuals, they would all occasionally look around at the others to see if they were reacting to the smoke and no one would respond. I think that this study says a lot about how humans react differently to responsibility in communities.