Bibb Latane

Introduction

Bibb Latané, born 19 July 1937 in New York City, is an American social psychologist whose work made the presence of other people into an explanatory variable. His best-known contribution is the bystander effect, the finding that a person is less likely to intervene in an emergency when others are present than when alone, which he established with John Darley in a series of staged emergencies at Columbia University in the late 1960s. He also formulated social impact theory, which treats social influence as a function of the strength, immediacy and number of the people exerting it, and he introduced, with Kipling Williams and Stephen Harkins, the concept of social loafing. In the 1990s he imported dynamical systems theory into social psychology, using computer simulation to show how global patterns of opinion can arise from purely local interactions.

Latané's work sits at the centre of the situationalist tradition in American social psychology, the claim that conduct is shaped more by the immediate social field than by character. That tradition has also made his findings a target: the bystander effect in particular has been re-examined with meta-analysis, reanalysis of its own founding data, and, most damagingly, with surveillance footage of real emergencies, and the resulting debate has substantially qualified the strength and generality of the original claim.

Early Life and Education

Latané was born in New York City in 1937. Published information about his childhood is thin; he has written little about it, and biographical sketches have mostly followed his professional record. He took his bachelor's degree at Yale University in 1958 and then went to the University of Minnesota for doctoral work in social psychology, completing his Ph.D. in 1963 under Stanley Schachter, whose work on emotion, affiliation and social comparison set the style of Minnesota social psychology in that period: tightly controlled experiments on questions with an obvious real-world stake.

Before the bystander work, Latané studied social attraction in animals, running experiments on gregariousness and fear in laboratory rats. The interest in how simple rules of proximity and number generate collective behaviour never left him; it resurfaced three decades later in his simulation work on dynamic social impact.

Academic and Professional Career

Latané joined Columbia University after Minnesota, and it was there, in the second half of the 1960s, that he began the collaboration with Darley that made both their reputations. Working against the background of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese and the newspaper claim that dozens of neighbours had watched without helping, they designed experiments rather than relying on the case: a subject who believed he was discussing personal problems over an intercom with one, two or five other students heard one of them apparently have an epileptic seizure; a subject filling in a questionnaire in a room that slowly filled with smoke was either alone, with two passive confederates, or with two other naive subjects. In each case the presence of others sharply reduced helping, and the magnitude of the reduction depended on the number of others.

He subsequently held professorships at Ohio State University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directed the Institute for Research in Social Science, now the Odum Institute, during the 1980s. He later moved to Florida Atlantic University, where he was associated with its Center for Complex Systems, and he subsequently founded the Center for Human Science in Chapel Hill, an independent institute intended to support long-term work outside conventional academic structures. He has also served the field directly, including a period as a program director for social psychology at the National Science Foundation.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility

Latané and Darley's explanatory account is a decision model: before helping, a person must notice that something is happening, interpret it as an emergency, decide that the responsibility is theirs, know what to do, and then act. The presence of others disrupts the sequence at several points, but the mechanism they emphasised was diffusion of responsibility, the sense that with others present one's own obligation is a fraction of the whole. Two related processes compound it: pluralistic ignorance, in which each person takes the others' apparent calm as evidence that nothing is wrong, and audience inhibition, the fear of making a fool of oneself by overreacting. The seizure study, the smoke-filled room study and the "lady in distress" study conducted with Judith Rodin all showed the same pattern.

In 1981 Latané proposed that the impact of a group of sources on a target is a multiplicative function of three variables: strength, meaning the status, power or importance of the sources; immediacy, meaning their closeness in space or time or their psychological proximity; and number. The last is subject to sharply diminishing returns, so that the second person added to a group contributes much more than the tenth, a prediction that gave the theory a distinctive and testable form. It offered a single vocabulary for conformity, compliance, stage fright, and the effects of audiences, and it was extended to minority influence and to the effects of physical distance.

Working with Williams and Harkins, Latané showed that people exert less effort on a collective task than they do when working alone or when their individual output is identifiable. In the classic demonstrations participants who believed they were shouting or clapping in a group produced less noise per person than they did when they believed they were alone, and the loss disappeared as soon as individual performance could be measured. The finding supplied an experimental foundation for the long-standing suspicion that groups dilute accountability, and it has been applied extensively in organisational psychology.

From the 1990s, with Andrzej Nowak and James Liu, Latané recast social influence as a process distributed in space and time. In simulations and in experiments with electronic groups, individuals who simply adjusted toward the opinions of their immediate neighbours produced, at the level of the whole population, three emergent order parameters: clustering of like opinions, polarisation, and continuing diversity. The work argued that culture-level patterns can be generated without any top-down coordination, and it was among the earliest agent-based modelling in social psychology.

Major Publications

"Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1968), with John M. Darley
"Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1968), with John M. Darley
The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (1970), with John M. Darley
"Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1979), with Kipling Williams and Stephen Harkins
"The psychology of social impact," American Psychologist (1981)
"From private attitude to public opinion: A dynamic theory of social impact," Psychological Review (1990), with Andrzej Nowak and Jacek Szamrej
"Dynamic social impact: The creation of culture by communication," American Psychologist (1996)

Impact and Legacy

Few findings in social psychology have travelled as far as the bystander effect. It entered textbooks within a decade, it underpins the bystander intervention training now routine in universities, workplaces and armed forces, and it provides the conceptual basis for research on online harassment, where the same diffusion logic applies with the modification that low-cost interventions such as a report button are less subject to inhibition than public responses. Latané was twice awarded the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research, in 1968 for the bystander work and again in 1980 for social impact theory, and he later received the Donald T. Campbell Award of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1970 and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.

The criticisms have been substantial and are now part of the standard treatment. The first concerns origins. Manning, Levine and Collins showed in 2007 that the Genovese story, in the form in which it reached psychology, does not survive archival scrutiny: the figure of thirty-eight witnesses came from a single newspaper account, and there is no evidence that most of them saw the attack, understood what was happening, or that nobody called the police. A finding whose public authority rests on a misreported case invites suspicion about how it has been taught, even if the experiments themselves stand.

The second concerns the size of the effect. Fischer and colleagues, meta-analysing more than a hundred studies in 2011, found the effect real but considerably smaller than the original experiments suggested, and importantly conditional: it is strongest when the situation is ambiguous and largely disappears or reverses when an emergency is unambiguous and dangerous, when the bystanders know the victim, and when they believe themselves competent to help. Moving from one bystander to two produces most of the inhibition; adding further bystanders produces less than early models predicted.

The third is the most serious. In 2008 Darryl Stalder reanalysed the Latané and Nida meta-analysis of 1981, which had declared the effect robust, and reported a calculation error; on the corrected analysis more bystanders were associated with a greater likelihood that a victim received help, at least where bystanders could not see one another. In 2019 Richard Philpot and colleagues coded 219 clips of real public conflicts recorded on surveillance cameras in Lancaster, Amsterdam and Cape Town, and found that at least one person intervened in 90.9 per cent of them, with the likelihood of intervention rising as the number of bystanders rose. Their conclusion, that involvement rather than non-involvement is the norm in inner-city public conflicts, directly contradicts the popular version of the effect.

Defenders, including the authors of the CCTV study themselves, point out that these findings answer a different question. Philpot's data establish that a victim is likely to be helped by someone; the bystander effect proper concerns whether each individual bystander is less likely to help as the number of others grows, and the two can be true at once. The laboratory effect is robust, replicates across countries and emergency types, and describes situations of ambiguity, a strange noise, an unclear distress, rather than a visible assault. Latané's five-stage model also continues to do practical work regardless of the effect's size, since it identifies the specific points, noticing, interpreting, and taking responsibility, at which training can intervene. Even sympathetic readers now treat the effect as a description of how responsibility is allocated rather than as evidence that crowds are indifferent.

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References

Latané, B. (1981). The psychology of social impact. American Psychologist, 36(4), 343-356.