Essay On Diffusion Of Responsibility

• What is diffusion of responsibility? Describe two studies that address the concept.
1. Diffusion of responsibility is people have the feel of less responsibility in the presence of other people.
2. One research study that addresses this concept was done by Piliavin et al (1969) where a model would fall on an underground train, holding a cane to represent an ill person or a bottle in a brown paper bag to represent a drunk person, Piliavin et al. found that people were more likely to help the ill model, and the longer the models weren’t helped the more likely it was that someone would leave the area in which the emergency was happening.
3. Another research study that addresses this concept was done by Darley & Latane (1968) where they got participants and asked to discuss personal problems new college students could have, each participant sat in a booth alone and eventually a participant staged a seizure to find that the number of bystanders had a major effect on participant’s reaction to the situation compared to the participants in the alone condition, about 85% went out and reported the seizure when there were no bystander, and only 31%

Research evidence which found effects of in-group bias was done by Tajfel et al. (1971) who did two experiments one being that boys were taken into the laboratory and shown a cluster of dots, then asked to estimate the number of dots, categorized as either over or under-estimators, each boy was individually asked to assign points, which represented real money, to an unnamed member of both their in-group and outgroup and the second experiment being essentially the same, except with the boys being separated by their preference for the artwork of Kandisky or Klee and found that the boys showed in-group favoritism, consistently allocating more points to members of their in-group than their outgroup and would also assign points in a way to maximize the difference between the two groups, even if it meant rewarding their group