Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Among the studies lending support to this view is an experiment designed by John Darley and Bibb Latané that sought to determine what led bystanders to help a stranger in an emergency—in the case of their experiment, an epileptic seizure heard over an intercom. Personality traits (tender-heartedness, coldness) turned out to matter little. The key factor was whether the bystander believed he or she alone heard the attack or thought other people were present, in which case the likelihood of intervention declined, a phenomenon Darley and Latané termed “the diffusion of responsibility.”