I came upon this book last year -- Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels by Catherine A. Sanderson. An interesting story there reminds me of a Chinese saying, 三个和尚没水喝 (sān gè hé shang méi shuǐ hē), its literal meaning is: Three monks have no water to drink. This is the third part of the saying: If there is one monk, he will fetch water for himself. If there are two, they will fetch water together. But if there are three or more, none will take it upon himself to fetch water, thus no water for all. It carries the same meaning as this: "Everybody's business is nobody's business."
The story goes like this. In a small village, every house has a vineyard for making its own wine. The town has this custom -- on New Year's day, each family brings a bottle of their best wine of the year to a town gathering and pour it in a huge wine barrel, so all the people enjoy it over a feast.
One year, a husband has this idea, our bottle of wine is the best in town. When we mix with others' wines, nobody can enjoy our wine. Why not keep it ourselves and fill the bottle with boiled water and pour it in? Nobody can tell anyway. So he did.
But he quietly shared this secret with one of his relatives who started playing the same trick. The practice spread slowly and surely. Of course, the quality of this barrel of wine at the New Year's dinner is getting worse and worse.
Eventually, one year, people turned on the taps on the barrels and out flowed pure white water!
The author used the story to illustrate how social slackness and irresponsibility can snowball and eventually generate more and more destructive consequences.