Picture this: you are the first person to get to class one day, so you sit alone and wait for your classmates and teacher to show up. All of a sudden,

The Smoky Room Experiment: Trust Your Instincts

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2024-12-04 18:30:18

Picture this: you are the first person to get to class one day, so you sit alone and wait for your classmates and teacher to show up. All of a sudden, smoke starts billowing from the wall vent. You would seek help or pull the fire alarm, right? Now picture this: it is the middle of the period, and your teacher is lecturing in front of a full class. You notice smoke billowing from the wall vent, so you look around to see if anyone else sees what you see. Your classmates look at the smoke, shrug, and continue on with the lesson. Do you still seek help or pull the fire alarm, even though nobody else seems to care about the smoke coming from the vent?

When you are alone and encounter an emergency, the pressure to take action weighs heavily on you. But what about when other people witness the emergency, too? Do you stick to your intuition and do something, or do you trust that others in the group will act accordingly or have knowledge of the circumstances that you do not? Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley put this exact situation to the test in a 1968 study known as the Smoky Room Experiment.

The Smoky Room Experiment was an investigation into a phenomenon known as “diffusion of responsibility.” In the words of the study’s authors, “if an individual is alone when [they] notice an emergency, [they are] solely responsible for coping with it. If [they] believe others are also present, [they] may feel that [their] own responsibility for taking action is lessened, making [them] less likely to help.”

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