A Structural Reinterpretation of Responsibility, Risk and Helping in Small Collectives of Children

Children arriving at a community center were arranged into groups to tour a moderately frightening Halloween spook house, I pretested for design. Fifty-one such small collectives were analyzed to determine the effect of composition (group size, age and gender make-up) on helping action in risky situations. This study sought two goals. The first was to suggest a structural-interactional model that integrated numerous findings previously given only ad hoc explanations in the psychological literature. Second, and related, two possible explanations of the collective actionlinaction response to risk were evaluated: the diffusion of and the allocation of responsibility (relative to internal social heterogeneity and emerging structure). The latter explanation was supported by our analysis and predictedffrom the theoretical model.