CONCEPT

Diffusion of Responsibility

Glover's second erosion mechanism: the distribution of action across enough agents — or, newly, between humans and tools — that each participant can reasonably claim his contribution was insufficient to produce the harm, allowing the harm to occur while responsibility disappears into the architecture of the system.

The most reliable finding from Glover's study of institutional atrocity was that perpetrators rarely experienced themselves as perpetrators. The camp administrator who processed transport manifests experienced himself as a bureaucrat. The engineer who built the gas chambers experienced himself as an engineer. The guard who escorted prisoners to the trains experienced himself as a guard. Each could point to some other agent in the system — the one who gave the order, the one who wrote the policy, the one who actually killed — as the locus of responsibility. The diffusion was the mechanism. No one did it. The system did it. And the system belongs to no one. Glover traced this mechanism across contexts: the firing squad where one rifle holds blanks and no one knows whose, the committee decision where every member voted yes but none feels accountable, the bureaucratic chain where every link can honestly

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