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underlie the bystander effect: hesitancy to act in front of others until one knows whether helping or other action is appropriate; the feeling that the inactive others understand the situation and that nothing need be done; and, most important, “diffusion of responsibility”—the feeling that, since others know of the emergency, one’s own obligation to act is lessened.39 A number of later experiments by Latané and Darley, and by other researchers, confirmed that, depending on whether bystanders can see other bystanders, are seen by them, or merely know that there are others, one or another of these three processes is at work.

The Darley and Latané experiment aroused widespread interest and generated a crop of offspring. Over the next dozen years, fifty-six studies conducted in thirty laboratories presented apparent emergencies to a total of nearly six thousand naïve subjects who were alone or in the presence of one, several, or many others. (Conclusion: The more bystanders, the greater the bystander effect.) The staged emergencies were of many kinds: a crash in the next room followed by the sound of a female moaning; a decently dressed young man with a cane (or, alternatively, a dirty young man smelling of whiskey) collapsing in a subway car and struggling unsuccessfully to rise; a staged theft of books; the experimenter himself fainting; and many others. In forty-eight of the fifty-six studies, the bystander effect was clearly demonstrated; overall, about half the people who were alone when an emergency occurred offered help, as opposed to 22 percent of those who saw or heard emergencies in the presence of others.40 Since there is less than one chance in fifty-one million that this aggregate result is accidental, the bystander effect is one of the best-established hypotheses of social psychology. And having been so thoroughly established and the effects of so many conditions having been separately measured, it has ceased in recent years to be the subject of much research and become, in effect, another closed case.

However, research on helping behavior in general—the social and psychological factors that either favor or inhibit nonemergency altruistic acts—continued to grow in volume until the 1980s and has only lately leveled off. Helping behavior is part of prosocial behavior, which, during the idealistic 1960s, began to replace social psychology’s postwar obsession with aggressive behavior, and it remains an important area of research in the discipline.

A Note on Deceptive Research: One factor common to most of the closed cases dealt with above—and to a great many other research projects in social psychology—is the use of elaborately contrived deceptive scenarios. There is almost nothing of the sort in experimental research on personality, development, or most other fields of present-day psychology, but for many years deceptive experimentation was the essence of social psychological research.

In the years following the Nuremberg Trials, criticism of experimentation with human subjects without their knowledge and consent was on the rise, and deceptive experimentation by biomedical researchers and social psychologists came under heavy attack. The Milgram obedience experiment drew particularly intense fire, not only because it inflicted suffering on people without forewarning them and obtaining their consent, but because it might have done them lasting psychological harm by showing them a detestable side of themselves. Milgram, professing to be “totally astonished” by the criticism, asked a sample of his former subjects how they felt about the experience, and reported that 84 percent said they were glad they had taken part in the experiment, 15 percent were neutral, and only 1 percent regretted having participated.41

But in the era of expanding civil rights, the objections on ethical grounds to research of this sort triumphed. In 1971 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare adopted regulations governing eligibility for research grants that sharply curtailed the freedom of social psychologists and biomedical researchers