Works
- Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968
- The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help?, 1970
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Diffusion of responsibility. In an intercom study, students who believed others could also hear a fellow participant's apparent seizure were less likely to help, and slower when they did, than students who believed they alone could hear it. Darley and Latané explained this as diffusion of responsibility: each witness feels a smaller share of the obligation to act when others are present. Caveat: The case often used to introduce this research, the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese with "38 witnesses", was misreported, and The New York Times acknowledged in 2016 that its original account was inaccurate. A meta-analysis (Fischer and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2011) found the bystander effect real but weaker in clearly dangerous emergencies.
What it explains
Latané and Darley explain why spreading a decision or a duty across many people makes it less likely anyone will act or be held to account. Committees, multiple sign-offs, and vague ownership all reproduce the conditions they studied.