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Study on Participants' Reactions to Emergency Situations Essay

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In order to conduct this study, Latane and Darley found subjects by contacting male Columbia college students by phone. Once they arrived they were directed to a waiting room where they had to complete a questionnaire. Next, experimental manipulation occurred in which the subjects were randomly split into groups. Some subjects were alone, others were part of a three person group with one subject and two confederate subjects that acted like “undercover” participants, and the last group was three inexperienced subjects. Then, a critical situation occurred as soon as subjects completed two pages of the questionnaire. The experimenter introduced smoke through a small vent. The behavior as well as communication between the subjects was observed …show more content…

This post experimental information is important because it gives a different perspective of the data by looking who reported and who didn’t report the smoke regardless of what condition they were in. Latane and Darley concluded that overall this study is based off of two ideas: diffusion of responsibility and social influence. Social influence applies to the group of three naive subjects and the group including the two confederates. In these groups the subjects involved felt less responsible to report the smoke or emergency in this study since there were other people around which means if something were really an emergency they would report it. The idea of diffusion of responsibility applies also to these two condition groups. This means to take responsibility to take action so people will be more likely to do something. You are either responsible for taking action or you have already taken action. Latane and Darley proposed several explanations to why their observations occurred. One of these explanations was, togetherness reduced fear in groups to not report smoke while individuals feared the dangerous event so therefore they responded. Subjects in the group condition felt that the presence of other’s increased their ability to cope with fire. Another explanation was the desire to hide fear, found more accurately in the group condition since they saw themselves as engaged in a game of “chicken” since if you responded

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