Darley and Latane conducted a series of elegant experiments that demonstrated this diffusion of responsibility principle. In one experiment, students sat in a waiting room and completed a questionnaire before they were due to participate in an experiment in another part of the building. Sometimes, the students sat alone in the waiting room and sometimes they sat with several others. After a few minutes, the experimenters turned on a smoke machine in an adjacent room. Smoke began to filter under the closed door connecting the adjacent room to the room where the students waited for the next phase of their experiment. The waiting room slowly filled with smoke, and the students were compelled to notice that an unexplained source in the adjacent room was producing smoke.
When the students sat in the room alone, they were quick to leave the room to alert the experimenter to the thickening pall of smoke. But, when they sat with other students, they glanced around nervously at one another and often failed to respond at all. You can imagine the scene: four students attempt to preserve cool detachment as the room becomes so thickly filled with smoke that they can hardly see the questionnaires on their laps. In this and later experiments, Darley and Latane showed that people in groups fail to respond to emergencies, in part because they feel less personal responsibility to help, and in part because they're not sure whether the situation is an emergency at all. It's a classic stale-mate: no one wants to cry "emergency" when there's no emergency at all, so everyone continues to sit coolly by as the room fills with smoke.
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