John M. Darley

Common sense might suggest more witnesses means more help available.

Darley and Latins suspected the opposite.

In the 1968, they designed careful experiments to test it directly.

putting people in situation with a stage emergency, sometimes believing they were the only witness, sometimes believing others were also present, but unable to see or hear each other's.

When a task belongs to everybody, it can feel as though it belongs to nobody, right? The challenge is is learning when the pattern become

dangerous and how to break it, right?

In the year 1960s, social psychologists, John Darley and Bim

Blatine.

... nothing became a national symbol, and it launched, launched this research into bystander apathy.

So bystander apathy, um, a psychologist, there's a psychologist named John Darley and Bibb Latané who studied why people sometimes don't step in when others are around.

Mm.

Their experiments showed people were much less likely to help in an emergency when they believed others were also watching.

A room full of people waiting for a signal will take one from somewhere, even if the only signal available is that no one else is moving.

In the late 1960s, psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley tested this by quietly piping smoke into a room where people were sitting filling out questionnaires.

They wanted to know what people do when something seems wrong and no one else seems bothered.

So in that experiment, that classic smoke room experiment, three-quarters of people who were by themselves reported the smoke.

And there's real psychology behind why this happens.

Researchers call diffusion of responsibility, and it comes from that classic bystander effect research from psychologists Bibb L- Latane and John Darley that was done back in the 1960s.

So people have been watching this for a while.

And it followed the infamous case of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was murdered in New York in front of her neighbors, who never intervened.

This sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? You'd think more people means more chance of someone helping, but the research shows the opposite.

Two psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, developed this idea in the late 1960s, partly inspired by the real-life case of Kitty Genovese, a woman murdered in New York in 1964 while reportedly dozens of neighbors failed to intervene or call the police.

Now, later research has questioned some of the details of that case, but it was a powerful catalyst for psychological investigation.

Darley and Latané identified two key psychological processes that explain the bystander effect.

The first is diffusion of responsibility.

This is when the presence of other people reduces each individual's sense of personal responsibility.

This study is also important because it challenged the diffusion-of-responsibility hypothesis.

In a real-world setting with many bystanders, people still helped, especially in the cane condition.