Who's in Charge Here?
- 1 March 1988
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 14 (1), 17-22
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167288141002
Abstract
Past work has shown that bystanders often fail to help a victim in an emergency, because responsibility for helping diffuses over all the bystanders there. In the present experiment, subjects were exposed to a simulated emergency (a choking fit) that occurred in the course of a structured group interaction. Subjects who had been designated as subordinate group members for the experimental task generally failed to come to the victim's aid, consistent with past findings. Subjects who had been designated as group leaders were quite likely to intervene in the emergency, however, even though responding to the emergency meant violating the experimental instructions and thus nullifying their leadership role. The implication is that a leadership role functions as a generalized responsibility cue; so group leaders do not undergo diffusion of responsibility as much as subordinate group members.This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit:
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