Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 225

Remember that the diffusion of social responsibility requires that others are
involved—a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when
they think someone else will take the action. Size of the group is critical, and it
must be the case that no one person is singled out as responsible. So, not all
situations involving many participants will result in social responsibility diffusion.
For such diffusion to occur, the relationship of the individuals in the group to the
requestor—whether they are individually likely to be held accountable or not—is
key. Your supervisor asking you to put information on a web site to help others is
more compelling than a company president asking everyone to participate in a
knowledge repository.
You do not always get diffusion of social responsibility. In a demo run as part of
an HCI class we have repeatedly failed to achieve this effect. In this demo the class
teaching assistant emails the students (some individually, and some in groups of 2,
4, 8, 16, or 32 students) asking them to bring along an example book to the next
class. The numbers of students who bring in a book is about the same for those
students who are emailed individually as it is for those who are emailed in groups.
If there was diffusion of responsibility, there would be more books brought along
by those who received the individual email than those who received a group email,
Subsequent class discussions usually note that most of the students feel that this
request is not individual, that the teaching assistant will know them individually,
and that the lecturer will be able to tell whether or not they brought along a topic.
Sometimes students also report that the bland wording in the request is somewhat
unusual, which leads them to suspect that there is an ulterior motive behind the
request.
If you want to avoid diffusion of social responsibility, you should target par-
ticular individuals. It helps to use first names in emails, use individual commu-
nication, and to clearly note any possible consequences. In the case of bulletin
boards and online forums, people asking for help have to be specific (which is
possible with technical problems) and have to address individuals if possible. In
the case of online forums this is difficult and thus it may be better in many cases to
find help locally.
Note that diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance are not inevitable,
and can be avoided or prevented. Keltner and Marsh ( 2006 - 2007 ) suggest making
the need clear, so that there is no pluralistic ignorance about the need for help, and
to direct the request at specific individuals, so that the responsibility does not get
diffused.
8.2.3 Attributions and Attributional Style
Understanding why other people do things is called attribution. Attribution is
central to how we understand social situations. When we examine how people
make these attributions, we can start to identify some regularities: