"It's like a blind spot. It's something you don't see, or can't see, or your brain doesn't let you see because it assumes that it's Somebody. Else's. Problem."
In Code Geass: "My mother is dead!" "Old news, what of it?" This dialogue took place between a boy and his father. Just days after it happened.
Ichigo Kurosaki attempts this in Bleach but Can't Stay Normal and Chronic Hero Syndrome get the better of him and eventually he's stabbing bad guys with the best of shonen heroes.
What's odd is he's been able to see ghosts (called Pluses in Bleach) and cares for them, but when The Call finds him, he takes his new powers, saves his family, and then tries to hand it right back. Sorry, Ichibutt, it doesn't work that way!
To be fair to Ichigo, it's probably a heroic case of Not What I Signed On For. Ichigo's used to helping ghosts with last requests and the occasional bit of bully hunting at the most when he starts out. He didn't plan on fighting massive demonic monsters who eat human souls.
Kanako Oora in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei has this as her defining character trait. To her, everything else is somebody else's problem. Like, say, a huge pile of corpses in the classroom after one of Chiri's rampages. On the other hand, everybody calls her magnanimous for not judging you for your problems.
If it doesn't involve his little brother Mokuba, his company KaibaCorp, his position as a duelist, defeating Yugi Moto, or owning the most powerful cards, this defines Seto Kaiba of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! to a T.
Invoked by Fate in Mahou Sensei Negima!, when he tries to convince Negi not to interfere with his plans to destroy the Magic World. His argument was basically "This isn't your world, it's just a fantasy, and you really shouldn't interfere in its affairs." This is before Negi discovers who his mother is.
Pokémon Special: During their encounter at Fortree, Ruby states to Sapphire that he has no intention of helping defend Hoenn from Teams Magma and Aqua - his reasons being that [A] he's only in it for the Contests and [B] he isn't Hoenn born and raised. Cue the fireworks.
Ah! My Goddess had a few instances when passer-bys decided to ignore the heroes' home because they were used to strange happenings there and didn't want to get involved.
Cowboy Bebop: "I don't know, and I have no opinion."
On a Domestic Abuse episode, a boy who has a crush on a worker at a store frequently sees her being abused and wants to send her husband to hell. So Yuzuki, being the absolute Face of the series during this arc, seriously implies that since the lady didn't run away that maybe this is just a different kind of love and that the boy should just leave it alone.
Yuzuki herself as a child had an experience where she walked in on her ill mother passed out with blood coming out of her mouth. She runs around town screaming for help, only for no one to help her *
Her father was driving during a bus accident that killed him and many other people on the bus because the brakes stopped working. The bus company told everyone that it was the fault of the driver, so the who family was shamed.
On another episode, a guy who intended to help his friend ( who was near driven to insanity after being forced to lie for his lazy mother ) is sent to hell for being too intrusive.
In another episode, a bus full of people does not help a man who is being harassed on that bus ( who, once he left the bus is implied will either be killed or have his head shaved with a knife).
There are a few depictions of people being bullied in front of everyone and no one doing anything about it.
Comics
In DMZ, Wilson has kept his army of "grandsons" out of several fights and military incidents because it either isn't their fight, isn't their war, isn't something that concerns them, etc. Wilson's only concern is building up his power in China Town/among the Chinese, and working towards being the most powerful force in Manhattan.
Peter Parker didn't get involved when a thief ran past him (when he could have easily stopped him thanks to his powers) because he thought it was Someone Else's Problem. Of course, Someone Else's Problem can easily become your problem — a lesson Peter learned the hard way.
In Blue Beetle, the manager of a hotel is partly responsible for the deaths of over twenty people he refused shelter while a supervillain was rampaging outside, unrepentantly claiming that it's not his problem because they weren't paying customers.
Fanfiction
In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Kyon performs a more limited version of this trope. He doesn't want to rely too much on Yuki, Haruhi has a limit on her her reality-warping, so he dumps all the problems he can't fix to Koizumi and his organization. What Kyon's guile can't fix, Koizumi's organization usually has the connections and resources to pull it off.
Film
In Airplane!, fully a third of the gags are set up by contrasting the terrible things happening and the passengers' complete indifference to them. Examples include the unconscious bodies of the pilots being dragged through the aisle, a little girl nearly dying after her IV gets knocked out, and the Offscreen Crash near the end.
The passengers in Airplane! II: The Sequel react with utter stoicism to being told that the lunar shuttle they're on is off course and being hit by asteroids. Being told they are out of coffee induces a full scale riot.
Seems to be a prominent theme in Brazil, notably at the beginning; when the wrong man is sentenced to death, all any of the departments care about is that the problem doesn't trace back to them.
Rick Blaine in Casablanca appears this way for a while ("I stick my neck out for nobody"), especially when he seems willing to turn over a resistance leader to the Nazis because he is married to Rick's former lover. Eventually, however, we see that Rick isn't nearly as selfish as he lets on.
A man on the street frantically screaming "They're here!" only to be ignored / assumed mad in most if not all versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".
As does The Leaky Cauldron and the door to St Mungos (when it's not disguised as an abandoned department store) and presumably most wizarding establishments.
It's stated in GoF that the Wizards have spells that make Muggles remember stuff they had to do when they enter the AoE of the spell.
In Terry Pratchett's Making Money Moist von Lipwig notes that people pay more attention to small noises than big ones, because while small noises are immediate and threatening, loud noises are 'everyone's problem, and therefore, not mine'.
Richard Mayhew's refusal to yield to this trope, when he found Door bleeding on the sidewalk, led him into London Below in Neverwhere. His fiancee declared it Somebody Else's Problem, and so remained in London Above.
Residents of London Below tend not to be noticed by the Above folks in the first place. Later in the book, his fiance recognzies him for a brief moment, then is unable to even -see- him.
In the Gone series, 90% of the Perdido Beach kids have this attitude. An appartment is burning down with a kid inside? Sam can deal with it. We're running out of food? Sam can find more. The Human Crew is running around trying to kill the mutants? That's the Sam's problem, not ours. Caine and Drake have gotten into the Power Plant and are going to feed uranium to a monster? It's Sam's job to stop them!
The entire Four Man Band of Seinfeld is incarcerated in the finale for the many, many times they do this (as well as just being horrible). The breaking point is the four watching a man get mugged and laughing about it.
In one episode of The Young Ones, the characters have stumbled across a time warp and now have a horde of medieval peasants out to kill them. They are terrified, and wonder aloud how they are going to get out of this predicament, when Vyvyan says "Who cares?", and the housemates instantly lose interest in their own mortal peril. End of episode.
In Doctor Who, an SEP field is why no-one thinks a spaceship disguised as a police box is an odd thing to see anywhere other than 1960s England. Move along, nothing to see here...
Along those lines in the 3rd Series finale "The Last of the Timelords" they introduce a "perception filter" that makes people not care to pay attention to you
Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It calls this trope NoMFuP: "Not My Fucking Problem".
Mason: There's a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. We believe it's going to go off today.
Jack: How good's your intel?
Mason:Very.
[Jack walks out]
To elaborate, Jack is still haunted by his wife's murder, his daughter wants nothing to do with him, and he's on the verge of suicide. The reason he leaves is to warn Kim to get out of LA. Later, when seeing a mother with her child, Jack decides to do something about it.
Not My Problem attitudes are a huge part of The Wire and, in a lot of cases, why things are so awful. Almost every character is more interested in dodging the wrath of their superiors and the system than actually fixing anything, and in the very first episode Bunk berates Jimmy about "giving a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck." Even the people actually doing some good, like some homicide or MCU detectives, care a lot more about the stats or what a lost witness means to an investigation than they do about the fact that a person has died.
And asking you to deliver trinkets to some dude and generally just standing around doing nothing.
This happens in every single RPG in existence, even when there's a giant meteor hanging in the sky or the last boss is hanging over the earth in a huge purple blob and you're the world's only hope. Chalk it down to how confident they are in the hero's skills.
A notable subversion is Wizardry 7, in which competing parties are not only attempting to reach the same goal as your party, they can actually find and take important main-quest items before you, making the game more difficult to finish.
In the Baldur's Gate games, the lazy, lazy members of the world may well claim to be amazing warriors, but they'll still stand around waiting for you to reach them before they go to rescue their friend/kill rats/buy a book/retrieve something that was stolen.
In regards to characters the developers intended to be recruitable to your party, that's really more a case of Take Your Time mixed with Always Close. They are going to go do that in just a little bit, but you "happen" to show up before then.
Final Fantasy X lampshades this with Rin charging the party. Even though he acknowledges that he might die soon, he has confidence in the party.
In Zelda games, the world's gonna be destroyed if the princess isn't rescued, whether she's been kidnapped, turned to stone, or vanished off the face of Hyrule. Of course, since you, Link, are already dealing with it, nobody's worried. It's YOUR problem now. They even charge you for equipment vital to your quest.
Averted in Majora's Mask - everybody knows that something horrible is about to happen. By nightfall of the last day, almost all of them have fled town - of the few who you are able to locate at this point, they acknowledge their flight probably won't make a difference. Only those in serious denial of the imminent catastrophe (and you, the player) remain behind.
Senel Coolidge from Tales Of Legendia has this mindset at first. He acts as if the world revolve around Shirley, and if something unrelated to her is presented to him, he ignores them or at least tell him not to bugger him with it, pissing off many people, especially Chloe, though eventually he stopped obsessing about her completely. This one is so bad that in the Tales of the World, he gets a What The Hell, Hero? yell that he'd rather let the world be destroyed than just halting his search for Shirley, then he takes the hint (after all, if the world is destroyed, he can't even reunite with Shirley at all).
This trope is why nobody helps Aeka with the horrible bullying she deals with in Yume Miru Kusuri. People realize she is suffering, but don't help her for fear that they will become targets. If the player picks her route, Kohei and her get so fed up with this that they leave school entirely.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, being a Wide Open Sandbox, allows you, the player, to ignore an impending demonic invasion. Sadly, it doesn't affect the gameplay by much, so you won't see any consequences of your negligence.
Averted in Dragon Quest IV. The first major city the Hero visits after his village is destroyed contains a party of adventures leaving (in formation) to defeat the ancient evil now that the Hero has (allegedly) been killed.
This happens pretty often in Schlock Mercenary, since the main characters are generally only interested in 1: survival and 2: getting paid.
Web Original
The attitude of the general population towards demons in Demonic Symphony, and oh boy does it backfire
There's an SCP (SCP-668) that lets people literally get away with murder by doing this.
And a hat—SCP-268— that functions as an SEP field — the effects of which are permanent if you wear it too much.
Western Animation
Nearly every character in Drawn Together (considering the prevalent Jerkass-ness) has done this at one point or another, but Captain Hero, a superhero whose Catch Phrase is "SAVE YOURSELVES!", is probably the worst offender. His response to Bambi wailing to him about his dead mother (that he shot no less) is:
Scruffy the Janitor may be the most blatant offender here: when asked why he didn't fix the boiler, his reply was "schedule conflict" and another flip of his porn magazine. When said boiler was getting ready to go critical ten feet away.
Scruffy: Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived. (licks finger, turns page)
It was also sort of used when the characters decide they don't care that Earth will be threatened by a giant garbage ball in about a thousand years. Mostly because launching said garbage ball was their method of averting the very same crisis during the present day.
In Invader Zim, a fair bit of the humour comes from the fact that nobody ever notices all the alien spaceships and Humongous Mecha that routinely appear.
The Simpsons. When Lenny and Carl walk past a tank containing radioactive gas that's bursting at the seams, Carl remarks nonchalantly about the tank's imminent failure, to which Lenny quips "Who cares? It's Homer's problem." Considering how over-the-top the dialogue was given the situation, this could even be considered Lampshade Hanging.
The Williams Street cartoons for [adult swim] specialize in this.
In Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Master Shake has a different (and often bizarrely random) reason every episode for not caring about what's going on - even in "Revenge of the Trees," where the Monster of the Week was looking for revenge on Shake.
Sealab 2021 does this a lot. In the pilot episode, "I, Robot," Quinn is trying to save Sealab from exploding — but everyone else is too busy with a Seinfeldian Conversation to help. In "Green Fever," zombies attack the station, but Debbie is too busy preparing her birthday party, Stormy and Sparks are busy chatting about steel pipes, etc. Exactly who is uncaring varies; in "No Waterworld," Quinn is too busy with his monster truck to help Debbie find out why all the water around the station has disappeared.
In Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Zorak and Moltar frequently get bored with Space Ghost's show, and decide their jobs on it are Somebody Else's Problem. Sometimes Space Ghost gets bored with his own show, and does the same thing.
On an episode of The Fairly OddParents, every anti-fairy escapes from prison, and Jorgen prepares to round them up. Then his shift ends, to which he responds "Your problem."
This trope very, very prevalent in The Fairly OddParents. The world gets taken over and heavily modified in just about every movie (twice in one of them) and the people act accordingly. Timmy usually makes an extravagant wish and somehow either everyone doesn't notice or is too stupid to understand what is happening.
In SpongeBob SquarePants - Wet Painters, Spongebob is in danger of having his butt removed by his boss and is abandoned in a moment of crisis by his own reflection.
Coop is the king of this trope. In one instance, he quite literally made a horde or rampaging monsters someone else's problem by chucking them into Philadelphia. In another, he blew up part of the moon, causing worldwide climatic change, and his only concern was buying bubblegum ice cream. He's destroyed several planets with (usually) no remorse, and is arguably more of a danger to the universe than the race trying to conquer it.
