Flood Relief in Pakistan and the Diffusion of Responsibility

Pakistan was struck with the worst floods in recent history, affecting some 33 million people, including around 16 million children. The situation on the ground is dire and urgent assistance is required to ensure the survival and well-being of these affected families. Over 10 million children are at serious risk, requiring immediate support and rehabilitation as they face the onset of waterborne diseases and a severe lack of food and other necessities. For many of the affected people, it is clearly a life-and-death situation.

Many experts hold climate change to be a major cause of the devastating floods that have hit the country. The Pakistani government estimates losses amounting to $40 billion as of now. The floods have severely damaged or destroyed public infrastructure, which includes hundreds of thousands of homes, public schools and hospitals. The damage on the ground is unfathomable and continues to worsen even as flood waters recede. Children face hunger, malnutrition, shortage of potable water and terrible waterborne diseases like malaria, diarrhoea, dengue, typhoid etc.

The results were easy to understand: people were more prone to helping others if they were the only ones on the scene, and their levels of participation decreased as more and more people became involved in the situation. As a result of the experiment, psychologists coined the term ‘the diffusion of responsibility’, the idea that we feel less responsible to act in a situation when there are others present as well. When there are many people who can potentially act in a given situation, each is likely to wait for the other to act, and hence, nobody acts. It is also called the ‘bystander effect’.

Although there are definitely many factors, including political and economic ones, that ascertain our commitment to the flood-affected people in Pakistan, there is little reason to doubt, in my opinion, that ‘diffusion of responsibility’ has also played a role in the inadequacy of our collective concern for the millions living in serious deprivation due to the floods. Since there are a possible seven billion other people who can come to the aid of the 33 million flood victims, the probability of actual help decreases substantially, as the experiment had suggested. This becomes grossly evident with the level of media coverage being offered to the issue in local and international news, as well as on social media.

People need to realize, even though the flood waters have receded, the crisis is still nothing short of a calamity. We need to take steps to overcome the diffusion of responsibility, and take personal ownership of the matter. We can do so by improving coverage of the situation and bringing forward anecdotes and personal stories of the affected people to elicit a response from people who fall prey to the bystander effect in this situation. The people of Pakistan can create better awareness of the dire aftermath of the flood through personalized social media messages to mitigate the diffusion of responsibility and turn it into personal responsibility. The overseas Pakistani community needs to make sure that the message goes across to foreign media and governments as well.

The article was first written as an assignment for an online MOOC in psychology.

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