The Diffusion of Responsibility in Social Anxiety

While many people take great steps to hide from or avoid publicizing their afflictions, everyone knows someone with an anxiety disorder.  One of the more prevalent of these disorders is social anxiety disorder, which afflicts approximately 15 million Americans.  This disorder, as the name infers, takes hold when the person “experience[s] an intense fear of being scrutinized and negatively evaluated by others in social or performance situations.” (ADAA)  Oftentimes in these situations the person will have symptoms that include “blushing, profuse sweating, trembling, nausea, and difficulty talking.”  While those symptoms accurately depict reactions to a phobia, I’d like to consider the symptoms of social anxiety in the light of another psychological anomaly: the bystander effect.

The bystander effect came into light after Kitty Genovese, then a 28 year old bar manager, was fatally stabbed while approximately 12 people witnessed the murder and did not come to her aid.  This effect, also called the Genovese syndrome, is a psychological and sociological anomaly whereby a group of individuals (usually 10 or more) do not act in an emergency situation.  There are two theories for this inaction: pluralistic ignorance, which states that individuals are simply copying the others’ inaction, so that they believe inaction is the appropriate response, and the second theory is diffusion of responsibility, which theorizes that without assigned responsibility, individuals assume someone else has the knowledge or responsibility to react to the situation.

So how are the two connected?  I theorize that some who are afflicted with social anxiety are not being possessed by a phobia, but rather encounter diffusion of responsibility.  By taking part in an event which exposes the social anxiety, it puts the individual in “bystander” mode, who simply shuts down and cannot speak.  Large groups, in my theory, trigger the individual’s mind to believe that in such a large group that responsibility cannot be assigned, and therefore is diffused.

Treatment for overcoming the social anxiety, then, would not focus on the commonly-implemented exposure therapy, but rather cognitive therapy.  Exposure therapy, which, as the name suggests, exposes the individual to the phobia, won’t work as well as cognitive since the anxiety comes not from a phobia of people, but because of a loss of responsibility and role in large groups.  Cognitive therapy, meanwhile, will allow the patient to understand and assign his or her role in large groups, which, in turn, will hopefully result in the diffusion of responsibility never surfacing.

While I do not believe this is the case for everyone afflicted with social anxiety, I do believe this happens to a segment of the afflicted.  By changing the procedure for dealing with these individuals, perhaps a greater number of those afflicted would become cured, and would become confident in social situations instead of avoiding them, allowing them to apply themselves in larger groups and in beneficial social situations.