Somebody else's problem

Somebody else's problem (also known as someone else's problem or SEP) is a psychological effect where people choose to dissociate themselves from an issue that may be in critical need of recognition. Such issues may be of large concern to the population as a whole but can easily be a choice of ignorance by an individual. Author Douglas Adams' comedic description of the condition, which he ascribes to a physical "SEP field", has helped make it a generally recognized phenomenon. Somebody Else's Problem has been used to capture public attention on matters that may have been overlooked and has less commonly been used to identify concerns that an individual suffering symptoms of depression should ignore. This condition has also been employed as trivial shorthand to describe factors that are "out of scope" in the current context.^[1]

Psychology

Various areas of psychology and philosophy of perception are concerned with the reasons individuals often ignore issues that are of relative or critical importance. Optimism bias tends to reduce issues of subjectivity due to the tendency to have thought processes that are overly positive: "Overly positive assumptions can lead to disastrous miscalculations — make us less likely to get health checkups, apply sunscreen or open a savings account, and more likely to bet the farm on a bad investment."^[2]

Where multiple individuals simultaneously experience the same stimulus, diffusion of responsibility and/or the bystander effect may release individuals from the need to act, and if no-one from the group is seen to act, each individual may be further inhibited by conformity. The murder of Kitty Genovese, who on March 13, 1964, was stabbed and killed outside of her apartment building, has classically been given as an example: "Most of the evidence suggests that at least half a dozen-and perhaps many more-of her 30 or so neighbours heard the events but failed to come to her aid. Most didn't even bother to call the police."^[3] Subsequent research has questioned media reports of the killing and characterized it as "repeatedly misrepresented."^[4]

When individuals are exposed to a multitude of messages about pressing matters of concern, information overload (now also known as "information fatigue syndrome"^[5] may be a result. In Joseph Ruff's article "Information Overload: Causes, Symptoms and Solutions" Ruff states, "Once capacity is surpassed additional information becomes noise and results in a decrease in information processing and decision quality".^[6] A student who has spent the entire semester socializing instead of studying would find themselves in a state of information overload the day before a final exam, for example.

There may also be a tendency to argue that since a proposed solution does not fit a problem entirely then the entire solution should be discarded. This is an example of a perfect solution fallacy. "This fallacy is often employed by those who believe no action should be taken on a particular issue and use the fallacy to argue against any proposed action".^[7]

However, taking responsibility for negative events that are outside an individual's control is related to depression and learned helplessness, particularly in adolescents.^[8] Part of the solution is to help the individual to realistically assign a proportion of responsibility to herself/himself, parents and others (step I in the RIBEYE cognitive behavioral therapy problem-solving method).^[8][9][10]

Politics and economics

French president Nicolas Sarkozy warned the U.S. Congress that "The [decline of the] dollar cannot remain someone else's problem. If we are not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be victims."^[11]

The New York Times said that when the Shah of Iran was exiled in 1979 he became "someone else's problem" from the point of view of President Carter's administration.^[12]

In the election of 2006, the Swedish Centre Party used the phrase "nånannanism" (someone-else-ism) as a catchword for their campaign.

In an interview by Bloomberg News on Dec 15, 2014, on domestic politics Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán stated that "Hungarians welcomed illiberal democracy; the fact that in English it means something else is not my problem", which is an indirect reference to SEP.^[13]

Environment and public protection

British politician Peter Ainsworth acknowledges that "climate change can seem huge, complex, remote and someone else's problem."^[14] An example which contributes to the effects of climate change can be viewed within Anthony Penna’s book “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” in which Penna states, “Unregulated local industries continue to pollute the soil, water, and air, while the depletion of local wood reserves for fuel degrades the forests."^[15] Such environmental destruction can be viewed as someone else's problem since many individuals are unaware of unregulated destruction taking place and when this fact is discovered they may feel as if there is nothing that they themselves can do to contribute to ceasing this process- ultimately linking it to the condition- diffusion of responsibility.

Douglas Adams was himself concerned about such failures to recognise the need for action and, with Mark Carwardine, published the book Last Chance to See, which highlighted endangered animal species. This can coincide with the quotation, “Nature is 'it' not 'thou'”, which sums up the contemporary trend that many individuals/populations have “othered” themselves from the environment resulting in devastating levels of destruction to the land and mass extinction rates.^[16]

Technology

The sub-goals of programmers working on a shared artifact "can be deferred to the degree that they become what is known amongst professional programmers as an 'S.E.P.' – somebody else's problem".^[17] This can be considered an aspect of social loafing where, in some instances while working as a team, individuals become less productive because they feel less responsible for the final product.

Unix became popular because when it was developed at Bell Labs where "profits were somebody else's problem", so there was no reason not to share the source code with universities.^[18] This means that Bell Labs were not concerned with making Unix a profitable computer operating system and thus in turn making it conveniently accessible to university campuses.

Fiction

Within the novel Life, the Universe and Everything of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy science fiction series, his character Ford Prefect describes somebody else's problem as:

An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.

The narration then explains:

The technology involved in making something properly invisible is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it's simpler just to take the thing away and do without it....... The "Somebody Else's Problem field" is much simpler, more effective, and "can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery."

This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

In this case, the Starship Bistromath ("a small upended Italian bistro" with "guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches") has been hidden from the crowd watching a cricket match at Lord's by an SEP field. People may see it, but they take absolutely no notice of it due to the shielding mechanism that does not allow them to view the unique structures of the particular bistro.

The book says that the SEP field is derived from bistromathics and in particular the concept of an imaginary number called a "recipriversexcluson" whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. Modern science has been slow to investigate this further, though Professor John Wettlaufer of Yale University has apparently observed that it is very important for physicists working outside the mainstream "to have a genuine interest in learning about someone else's problem." However, he admitted that "not many people want to do this."^[19]

Essentially the same motif has also been used in other works of fiction, for example the Doctor Who "perception filter".

See also

• Buck passing
• Bystander effect
• Externality
• First they came ...
• Inattentional blindness
• NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)
• Other people's money
• Sheeple
• Tragedy of the commons

References