Somebody else's problem

Template:Merge to 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.

Origin

In Douglas Adams's 1982 novel Life, the Universe and Everything (in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction series), the character Ford Prefect says,

The narration then explains:

References by others

Since the publication of Template:H2G2, the phrase has been used by others, such as:

• Referring to a team working on a computer programming project, Alan F. Blackwell once wrote: "Many sub-goals can be deferred to the degree that they become what is known amongst professional programmers as an 'S.E.P.' – somebody else's problem."

• Christopher Negus, writing on the origin of Unix at Bell Labs in the 1970s, described Bell Labs at the time as "a think tank where ideas came first and profits were somebody else's problem".

• It has been used as a fictitious example of "psychological invisibility".

See also

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

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