Diffusion of responsibility

Biological Parallel

In honeybee colonies, dead bee removal (undertaking) is performed inconsistently in large hives because individual bees assume others will handle the task—response thresholds rise with colony size. Smaller colonies remove corpses faster despite fewer workers because each bee's sense of necessity increases when alternatives are scarce. Diffusion of responsibility evolved as a side effect of response threshold mechanisms: in social species, individuals calibrate action thresholds to group size, inadvertently creating collective inaction in large groups.