How Diffusion of Responsibility Helps and Hurts Trump’s Coup

Diffusion of responsibility is a social phenomenon that occurs when no individual in a group of people takes an action that is clearly needed. If you’ve taken a CPR course, they tell you to assign a specific person with the responsibility of summoning an ambulance. You are taught to say, You! while pointing to someone, call an ambulance! Rather than screaming CALL AN AMBULANCE! to the heavens. Too often it has happened that everyone in the crowd of on lookers just assumes that someone else will be calling the ambulance, so no one does. The responsibility for taking action has been diffused across the group with no single person infused with enough responsibility to be jolted into taking action.

Diffusion of responsibility is one of the causes of the bystander effect. When you are a bystander or witness to an event, you are not directly involved, you don’t have a specific role to play. Essentially, what happens is that a temporary behavioral norm forms among the onlookers. Norms are rules that govern behaviors in specific situations like shaking hands when you meet someone. We all know what to do in a specific situation because we have internalized rules to follow.

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Diffusion of Responsibility Applied

Let’s apply these ideas to our four scenarios and see what they tell us.

THE RESTAURANT AND THE TODDLER: None of the bystanders besides me acted to ensure the safety of the little girl. Everyone who saw her knew that she was far from the caregiver who was responsible for her. They just assumed that she was safe because everyone else within sight was acting as if she were safe meaning they were doing nothing. No one would let a toddler be in danger would they? Of course not. Since no one was intervening, she must be safe. It’s just logical, right?

GABRIEL STERLING AND THE GEORGIA STATE ELECTION WORKERS: No one was killing or doing violence to them because no one felt enough responsibility for killing or doing violence to them. Sure, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber was identifying them as the people who allowed the election to be stolen and maybe they even did some nefarious deed to steal the election. They at the very least aren’t lifting a finger to help him steal it. Imagine Gov. Kemp — who if he were Sec of State, he woulda stolen the election by now, you know that — hiding behind the law — THE LAW! — as if that is even a thing to refuse to steal the election for Trump. RINO. The problem is the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is not calling out Bubba Cornfed to take his AK-47 and shoot them up. He ain’t ordering the Proud Boys to march into the state capitol building to or vote counting centers and shoot every last one of the thieving cowards, now is he. The problem is that it is ambiguous. None of the people who could do the killing or the violence really feels like they have permission to do it. They don’t have a social norm of violencing people under those circumstances. They have the social norm of threatening them, though, so they act on that.

JOCELYN BEnSON AND HER FOUR YEAR-OLD SON: Everyone of those armed protesters was sure that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber would want them to shoot someone in the name of stopping the steal. But, they don’t have a social norm that governs when you shoot an unarmed middle-aged woman and her four year-old son putting up Christmas decorations in their own home. If someone had just shot someone, then they woulda all started shooting all the guilty peoples. Until someone started shooting Jocelyn and her son, no one was quite sure that they were guilty. If someone woulda shot them, then they woulda known they were guilty and okay to shoot, so they woulda shot her, too. It is just logic. Guilty people get shot by good people. The shooters are good, so if they shoot someone, it is because they’re guilty. There is no arguing with that logic. There just has to be a first shooter.

CONGRESSIONAL REPUBES: It isn’t their job to stick their neck out and tell the Ol’ Pussy Grabber to stop couping our election and accept that he lost. He’s making everyone very uncomfortable. Some of them are even fidgeting in their seats. Susan Collins has started to clutch for her pearls at least twice before she composed herself and lowered her hand. Tim Scott has even started talking aimlessly about discrimination that he’s experienced as a boy in the Deep South and Thom Tillis was heard to stifle a nervous giggle just the other day. They are plumb uncertain about how to handle the situation. They all have the notion that someone orta do something. So, they look around and see no one doing anything and they just figger, well, maybe not.

Reasons Congressional Republicans Don’t Take Responsibility

In a year or two when it is clear that it is safe and no personal risk is theirs, they’ll be happy to sit down with some sympathetic reporter to explain that wanted to do something and they hated all the couping that was happening. They were just so mad at that derned Ol’ Pussy Grabber! They whispered behind closed doors to their Dear Diary that it was wrong and there oughta be a law or something. If they had just realized that no one was going to stand up for democracy other than those who did, then they woulda, but there was no way for them to know that, so they didn’t. It’s not their fault, see? It’s just logic.

I mean, imagine, would you, if they had stood on their chair in the Senate chamber and shouted to the ceiling for god and Mitch McConnell and the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and all the MAGAs to hear that garsh darn it, the votes were cast and counted and Trump lost, now let’s get on with the business of governing and then one of the court cases succeeded or a legislature had appointed an alternate set of electors or a secretary of state had thrown out precincts of ballots how embarrassing that would be! They woulda been wrong. It is simply too big of a chance for a lowly backbencher of a senator to take.