As a psychology enthusiast, I love analyzing human behavior. Sometimes, though, I wonder when I notice something that hasn’t been popularized in the social sciences or self-help communities. My personal favorite is the formula for emotions that I identified that I still have yet to see take off (Emotions = Desire + Belief + Experience), but a recent one that I’m noticing yet no one calls out is selfish behavior that people have slyly managed to hide as selfless, moral behavior. I’m giving it a name, “Diffusion of Benefit”, which I’m using as a play on the well-known psychology term, “Diffusion of Responsibility”.
Diffusion of responsibility is when a group of people behave in immoral ways that they would never individually because they can rationalize their behavior and the resulting negative outcome as only partially their responsibility. Known colloquially as “mob mentality”, it’s basically the idea that groups act collectively worse than individuals would because no individual bears the full responsibility for their actions. You see this evident as statements such as, “Everyone was doing it!” and, “They can’t arrest all of us!”
Similarly, this concept I’ve coined as diffusion of benefit is when something is okay as long as a group does it instead of an individual. The most obvious example is theft. If one person takes someone else’s property, that is seen as immoral. While the “flash rob” (when many people rob at once) is also seen as immoral, no individual feels like they did much wrong by themselves—that’s diffusion of responsibility in action. Now, have a group of people take from someone through taxing him or her, voting a founder out of his own company (example: Steve Jobs), or outnumbering him or her at a party, event, club, or protest, and all of the sudden, it’s perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the people taking.
Effectively, diffusion of benefit is the inverse of the diffusion of responsibility: diffusion of responsibility is that a behavior isn’t wrong because they’re only partially responsible for the outcome; diffusion of benefit is that a behavior isn’t selfish and wrong because the outcome benefits many people and not just the actor.
You see this everywhere. I follow the crypto market, and not a month goes by without calls for “burning”—for those of you unfamiliar with the crypto world, burning is when you send a coin or token to an inaccessible wallet, effectively taking that amount out of the total supply of the currency. Now, anyone with any sort of critical thinking knows what is really being asked: someone else throw away their money so that another person’s money can be worth more (i.e., if my crypto is worth $1 and half its supply is burned, supply and demand would generally lead my crypto to now be worth $2 all other things being equal). That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that it’s a call for market manipulation (i.e., if someone releases a coin and then doubles the value by burning half the supply, it might cause a bubble/pump-and-dump where everyone buys to get in on the price rise until someone big sells their holdings and crashes the price). No matter how a person tries to spin the practice, anyone calling for this is asking for someone else to sacrifice for his or her benefit while simultaneously claiming to be intelligent and benevolent/selfless because the burning would “benefit all holders” in that scenario. That is diffusion of benefit.
In politics, people who will benefit from a tax law, regulation, or subsidy will talk about the benefit to all taxpayers to hide the benefit to themselves. People who are part of the anti-work movement are probably the best examples of this, as they literally want money for nothing and conveniently ignore the fact that other people working for your benefit with you doing nothing in return is effectively indentured servitude at best. The most controversial ones in the present time are known as “champagne socialists” who preach for equal income for all while they themselves live lavish lifestyles gained from their preaching (the most famous example of this being Hasan Piker, a famous millionaire socialist Twitch streamer). Logically, if someone had a consistent worldview, they would expect everyone to work equally and get paid equally or that everyone gets the same income including themselves, yet those activists always seem to think that everyone should work and sacrifice while they don’t. Anyone would plainly see the hypocrisy if they came out and said that, but since they cover it in the “everyone will benefit, not just me” veneer, it seems like it’s some sort of benevolent, selfless act to push for things that, in reality, would benefit themselves at others’ expense. Even people who push for things that would hurt themselves, like millionaires pushing for higher taxes (which they could pay at any time if they really wanted to), do it for the benefit of higher social status, more likes and followers, and (as a result) greater revenue.
Liberal comedian Bill Maher famously pointed out the problem with this diffusion-of-benefit approach when he said that he was all for reducing carbon emissions, but he wasn’t going to be the sole rube to sacrifice his comfort and convenience while no one else does. He called out the diffusion-of-benefit position as just what it was: asking a few people to sacrifice for supposed group benefit when it was really each individual acting in their own self-interest hoping others will sacrifice for them.
Outside of hot-topic areas like politics, you see this in daily life. I did this as a child when I got my mother to buy a game that I liked better because it was a cooperative game that my brother and I both could play (yes, it was mutually beneficial, but the real reason I made the argument was that I didn’t like the other game). Groups peer pressure members into doing things they don’t want to do for group benefit, with certain members never seeming to have to sacrifice. This happens very often, and everyone in the group accepts it because, as long as the majority receives some benefit, they’re going to go along with it.
There are two reasons why this isn’t a universal strategy:
Without these two practices, there would be a lot more selfishness-posing-as-selflessness behavior in society.
So, what can you do when you see diffusion of benefit in your life? Well, you can only do two things:
There are many techniques in this world that people use to persuade others and get what they want. This idea of diffusion of benefit is just one way that people do it. It is the less-harmful cousin of what has been coined “luxury beliefs”, which are beliefs that people espouse that make them look good and actually harm other people. The difference here is that there might actually be shared benefit, but it comes at a cost that the activist usually does not incur (or, like diffusion or responsibility, only incurs a small portion and tries to lay the rest on everyone else). Check for the difference between true compromise/cooperation and a hidden agenda, and you’ll usually be able to tell the difference.