Help and Aid

With power comes responsibility. This is a saying which states that when a person or group of people has power they must be responsible and know how to use it. For decades now, the Unites States has been a world superpower and was for a number of years arguably the only superpower. The country is thought of as the leader of the democratic world and serves as a model to many smaller third world countries trying to establish democracy.

There is a theory that explains diffusion of responsibility. This was a way of thinking that came about after an experiment conducted by Latane. After the experiment the conclusion was made that when people are in a group, they feel less personal responsibility to helping another person as they responsibility it shared amongst all of those in the group. In other words, in a group of four people, a single person will only feel 25% of the responsibility for a fifth person in need. (Latane) An example of this on a global scale could be seen during the events before World War II. When Hitler began slowly expanding into the countries surrounding Germany, the other countries adopted a form of appeasement to avoid war. With all of the other European countries, with the exception of Italy, the responsibility of stopping Hitler from taking over the smaller countries was shared so that none felt wholly responsible for keeping him in check. More current examples could be situations like the Rwandan genocide. This was something which the international community was aware of, but again, because most of the community was aware of it not much effort was put into helping from each individual country. Instead of a large UN force being sent, a very small group of soldiers from the different countries was used.

Unfortunately for the countries where violence occurs, the sense of responsibility and duty to help really is affected. This means that when famine or genocide breaks out that those affected will most likely receive less help than they need, in particularly from the larger countries like the United States. Despite having resources that could easily support and aide many of these international problems the financial or manpower assistance just isn’t given. Leaders and countries need to be fully aware of this and the psychology behind it and be able to give help to countries in need to the best of their ability.

Latane, Bibb. “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies”. 1968. http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/zsoc302/fall2002/experiments/Darley2.pdf