Bibb Latané

Bibb Latané (born 1937) is an American social psychologist best known for his work with John Darley on bystander intervention, a series of experiments that staged emergencies to show how inactive onlookers affect whether a person helps. He also developed social impact theory, which treats social influence as a function of the strength, immediacy and number of the people present, and with Kipling Williams and Stephen Harkins he introduced the term social loafing for the tendency to slack off in groups. He later brought dynamical systems ideas into social psychology, studying how order emerges in large groups. He took his doctorate at Minnesota under Stanley Schachter and founded the Center for Human Science in Chapel Hill.