The Volunteer's Dilemma: If No One Wants to Lose… Everyone Loses

Imagine the electricity goes out in your house. You quickly realize it's not just you affected, and the unexpected outage also reaches your neighbors. However, you decide not to notify the company, whether because you don't feel like it, don't want to waste time explaining what happened, or don't want to spend money on the call. Your conclusion is that another neighbor will take the trouble to do it, but if everyone thinks the same... everyone loses. That's the direction of the Volunteer's Dilemma, where someone inevitably loses so that others win without lifting a finger, or otherwise, they end up as badly off as the volunteer.

For some strange reason, I remembered that episode of The Simpsons where Homer runs for commissioner shouting "Couldn't someone else do it?", just because he doesn't want to take out the trash. Naturally, the consequences are devastating for the city, which ends up being relocated due to excess waste.

The critical point here is Homer's attitude: "Let someone else handle it." Now, the most interesting thing is that this line of thinking remains intact even when only the sacrifice of a single person is needed to benefit the rest and eliminate a problem at its root. Welcome to the Volunteer's Dilemma, where the volunteer receives no reward for their effort, but if they don't act, the whole group loses.

The Volunteer's Dilemma

An example cited over and over of the Dilemma takes us to 1964, and to the murder of a woman named Kitty Genovese. The original New York Times story said that 38 people witnessed the crime, but none of them called the police, thinking that someone else would take care of it, and they didn't want to bear the cost of getting involved.

Over time, it became known that the story was full of errors and falsehoods (nobody criticized it at the time because it was crazy to go against the controversial editor of the Times back then, Abe Rosenthal), and the newspaper admitted it 52 years later, but from that exaggerated article, the dilemma became popular, as did another very similar concept, the Bystander Effect, under which a person is less likely to help a victim when other people are present.

A deeper analysis of the Volunteer's Dilemma reveals three details. First, as the cost, effort, or sacrifice required of the volunteer increases, so does the possibility that no one will act.

Second, if the number of witnesses or participants rises, the 'gain' remains the same for everyone. And third, the most striking: if the number of individuals in the group increases, the probability of a volunteer emerging plummets.

Even so, there are variables we can't ignore: emergency vs. non-emergency situations, ambiguity, cultural differences, and diffusion of responsibility play a huge role, and there's much more going on behind the scenes than a simple lack of empathy.