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What Is Diffusion Of Responsibility Means? Essay

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Terrorism is a very big part of today’s average life and is only becoming an even bigger factor. Never has this been more apparent than after the recent terrorist attacks on Paris and San Bernardino. Now, almost daily we are presented some type of terrorist act that takes the life of many people. In response, many people talk about avenging those who died. However few actually do respond to the terrorists with more than words. I believe that this can be traced to a theory called “Diffusion of Responsibility” and the way to overcome this has already been shown to us, but we just haven’t noticed it. If we plan to overcome the many terrorist groups that take so many lives a year, we have to become aware of all the concepts in this text and use them to our advantage. These concepts include personal responsibility, not doubting your ability as an individual, and finding the correct combination of impulsiveness, logical reasoning and gut feelings.

I want to start be explaining what diffusion of responsibility means. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the definition of diffusion is “the spreading of something more widely” and one of the definitions of responsibility is “The state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something.” So how does the spreading of accountability have anything to do with the average person’s response to terrorism? The answer to this question is shown in the many intriguing results of the experiments of John Darley and Bibb Latane as well as other

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