Diffusion of Responsibility concerning Helping Behavior
Deciding to help another human being in an emergency situation seems like a simple thing to do. We associatively interpret a person's willingness to help as an instinctive result of altruism or, alternatively, an act motivated by egoism and self-interest. Scientific evidence though, suggests otherwise. Social psychologists know that the question of bystander intervention is a complex one, involving the interplay of many factors. Bernstein et al. define helping behavior as "any act that is intended to benefit another person." (Bernstein et al. 654). After decades of applying rigorous scientific methods to this investigation, we are now in the position to identify the reasons related to the failure or unwillingness to help someone in need. Some of these are dispositional factors referring to the personality traits of the individual, while others may be directly linked to the situation. Even characteristics of the victim affect our willingness to help. All the above, combined with the modern, urban way of life are only some aspects of the "Diffusion of Responsibility" phenomenon, termed by the Oxford University Press Dictionary of Psychology as "a reduced sense of personal responsibility and individual accountability experienced in
"Regardless of its source, adopting the perspective of the needy target is said to produce in the observer the feelings of compassion and tenderness we have labeled empathic concern. First, we need to expose people, especially children, to helpful role models. This experiment provides an illustration of how an individual's perception of the situation can affect his or her responses to an emergency. Cities enhance indifference as they are distracting and they create a curtain of anonymity behind which people can hide. Empathy, or "the shared feeling that results when we observe other people in emotional states, the compassion we feel for their sorrow, the resentment when they are slighted, the joy when they triumph" (Davis 2), is therefore viewed as a moral emotion that does actually foster altruism. As a society, we need to create a social norm that encourages altruism. Still we should allow that, even though there is usually an ultimate gain to helping behavior, we must commend and respect the individuals that engage in it. All these factors mainly derive from a more general phenomenon of our era called deindividuation. We must concede as well that people help easier their acquaintances compared to total strangers. In one of them, male subjects were given appointment for an interview. People are usually more willing to help if they know exactly what is expected from them. According to this theory, people who believe in justice perceive the world as a fair and predictable place in which good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished. As discussed above, there are many underlying factors that either encourage or discourage prosocial behavior.
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