Keywords

A guest lecturer steps onto the podium in an auditorium filled with about 100 students. She is introduced as a professor from Copenhagen Business School, and the students are encouraged to raise their hands to comment and ask questions during the lecture. What they do not know is that the lecturer in front of them is an actor who has been instructed to talk nonsense for an hour. She can use academic terminology and hint at knowledge of the core concept in the course, but in an unstructured and nonsensical manner. This is a social psychology experiment conducted for pedagogical purposes to see whether the students will intervene or remain silent during the lecture. The arguments they will hear from the podium will make little sense, both in the course context and otherwise. How will the students respond to the situation?

The false professor begins to speak. She uses course concepts, but haphazardly and inconsistently. Unease spreads among the students, but none of them raises their hand to ask for clarification or question the professor’s claims. For a full lecture hour, the students silently listen to the nonsense from the podium. Then the course coordinator tells them that they have taken part in an experiment and that the professor is an actor. The coordinator opens the discussion for reflection and comments. Students shyly admit that they did not understand what the professor was talking about but assumed that others did because they had also remained silent. Others say that they thought it would be impolite to challenge the guest lecturer, a visitor from another country who might have misunderstood the context of the course.

The purpose of the experiment was to introduce the students to the bystander effect, a psychological phenomenon where the number of people present in a situation tends to affect decision-making (Darley and Latané 1968; Manning et al. 2007). Research on this phenomenon has indicated that the likelihood that someone will provide help to a victim decreases with an increase in the number of people who are present. Recent studies have explored bystander effects in the context of how likely it is that people will intervene when they witness cyberbullying (You and Lee 2019), sexual assault (Kettrey and Marx 2021), and violence (Levine et al. 2020). The general pattern is that the more people who are at the scene, the less likely it is that anyone will act and provide help. Some studies indicate that bystanders in a group are more likely to intervene in the presence of danger. Being part of a larger group can provide protection and enhance initiatives rather than lead to passivity (Liebst et al. 2021).

Bystander effects can occur in situations at work where a number of people spot something that should be verbally addressed and can choose to take an initiative or not (Kvalnes 2017). In a study involving employees and managers working in a Fortune 500 organisation, Hussain et al. (2019) introduced the concept of voice bystander effect. They found that the more some information is shared among employees, the less any particular employee feels individually responsible for bringing up that information with their managers. Countering bystander effects can be a core concern for building and maintaining a constructive communication climate in an organisation or project. Such effects can occur at critical quality moments in a project process. Several project members can be aware that the person in charge of operations has made a crucial mistake, a weakness exists in the execution plan, or one particular team member has not had sufficient training and is not qualified for the task.

From the outset, one would assume that the more project members who know about these issues and who are in position to address them, the more likely it would be that one of them would do so. Research on bystander effects points in the opposite direction. It seems that the higher the number of project members who know, the more likely it is that all will remain passive and silent bystanders. In a debriefing of the situation, the project members’ silence may appear to be mysterious. Why does none of them speak up? Knowledge about bystander effects can help one to understand the lack of initiative and demystify the silence.

The chapter on critical quality moments included examples where silence or a lack of initiative from those present can be explained in terms of the bystander effect and its causes. Research points to diffusion of responsibility as one main reason why people are passive in numbers (Darley and Latané 1968; Barron and Yechiam 2002). We tend to make the mistake in moral mathematic of thinking that responsibility is a unit we share evenly and fairly among those present (Parfit 1984). In the fake lecturer example, the 100 students in the auditorium each thought they only had 1/100 of the responsibility for speaking up about the professor who talked nonsense on the podium. With so little responsibility, it is easy to justify to oneself that one has remained silent despite having misgivings. If 15 engineers look critically at the drawings and specifications of an installation, each of them can mistakenly think they have 1/15 of the responsibility for actually applying their expertise to identify possible weaknesses. If five people are supposed to control the documentation ahead of a money transfer, each of them can mistakenly assume that they only have one-fifth the responsibility to look closely at the details. In all three examples, people can also remain passive due to an assumption that the others are shaper and more alert than they are at present.

A nurse told me that diffusion of responsibility could set in even when only two persons are involved. She worked at a hospital where from time to time they would treat prisoners, some of whom were considered dangerous. It was important to make sure that after treatment they did not leave the hospital with sharp objects that they could use to harm others with later. To make sure this did not happen, both a trained nurse and a police officer would search each prisoner thoroughly upon departure. First, the nurse would conduct a search, and then hand over the prisoner to the police, who would conduct a second search. On one such occasion, the system failed, and a prisoner was able to smuggle a surgical knife out of the hospital. Both the nurse and the police officer had thought that the other person would do the job properly. They appeared to have split the responsibility for searching the prisoner in half, and each considered themselves to have only half the responsibility for doing a thorough search of the prisoner.

The second main reason for bystander effects goes under the label of pluralistic ignorance, a tendency to adjust our initial interpretation in light of what we take to be other people’s interpretation of it (Miller and McFarland 1987; Rendsvig 2014). Each of the students in the auditorium may initially have thought that the professor was talking nonsense but suppressed that thought when seeing the other students remain passive and seem to understand what she was saying. They interpreted the other students’ passivity as social proof (Cialdini et al. 1999) that everything was as it should be. In the engineering example, each of the 15 engineers may have had doubts about the drawings in front of them but kept silent because the other 14 seemed satisfied with what they saw. Similarly, each of the five members of the team who were responsible for quality control of the payment documents could have had misgivings about small details, but still kept silent due to the lack of protest from any of the others.

One common countermeasure against bystander effects is to give one person the role of being devil’s advocate (Nemeth et al. 2001; Brohinsky et al. 2021). This person is responsible for being extra critical and looking for weaknesses in the proposals on the table. The strategy aims to avoid diffusion of responsibility because it places the task of speaking up about critical issues firmly in the hands of one person. It also attempts to counter pluralistic ignorance, because the devil’s advocate is not supposed to adjust personal judgement to fit in with what other people take to be the case.

In the fake professor example, the course instructor could have elevated one student to be devil’s advocate and adopt a stance that is critical of what the guest professor had to say, instead of asking the whole group what they thought about the guest lecturer. If all the individuals in a group know in advance that at some point they may be chosen to give a response, then they are likely to be more alert and prepared than they would be if the responsibility were spread thinly out to everyone in the room and would remain so for the rest of the proceedings.

Informal devil’s advocates can operate in a range of organisational contexts. Some individuals always tend to speak up and take responsibility for being critical. They have not been formally assigned to that role, but their dissent emerges as a recurring pattern of the group process (Brohinsky et al. 2021). Colleagues will look to those individuals to voice a concern or point to weaknesses and mistakes in a proposal, because that is what they normally do. On one occasion, a group of Norwegian bank executives were gathered to make a major decision about the way forward. The CEO presented his preferred alternative and the arguments for it. Unease spread among the other executives, much like when a conductor gives the wrong tone to the singers in a choir. Most of them sensed that the CEO built his argument on a faulty assumption.

In this group, one person usually took on the role of being devil’s advocate. She would never hesitate to address flawed assumptions or weaknesses in an argument. On this occasion, she was completely silent. The people around the table glanced at her, waiting for an initiative, but it never came. No one else voiced their concerns or pointed to the weakness in the basic assumption. A decision was made in accordance with the CEO’s suggestion. Eventually, it led to exactly the sort of negative outcome that the other executives had feared.

In a debriefing, the group met to discuss why no one had opposed the CEO’s proposal. Many explained that they had expected the devil’s advocate to speak up, and that because she was silent, they began to have doubts about their judgement of the case. Several of them had reasoned that because she was passive, they had probably misjudged the proposal. Why had she not spoken? She explained that on the day she had been distracted by an ongoing dramatic event in her family and was checking her cell phone for news. She had not been able to focus on work-related issues. The lesson the group learned from this process was that the role of being devil’s advocate should circulate among them and not lie with the same person every time.

We have seen that bystander effects can occur in situations where an initiative is needed to stop a negative turn of events. Passivity in a group can also be a challenge in situations where an opportunity exists to provide acknowledgement and praise to individuals or groups in the organisation. A group of colleagues has done an exceptional job and they deserve vocal appreciation. Here is a critical quality moment. People are about to leave the meeting, and now is the chance to express praise in front of the whole unit. Whose responsibility is it to take this initiative?

The number of people present in such situations can create passivity even here. These colleagues really deserve a show of appreciation for what they have done. Many are present and in a position to raise their voice and provide it. Who will take responsibility for doing it in a group of 50? It could be the leader of the unit, but if that person for some reason is incapacitated, someone else needs to take charge. Considering what we know about bystander effects and passivity in numbers, the unit could identify someone to take on the role of being what we can call God’s advocate, with special responsibility to identify excellence and effort in the workplace and speak up about them.

Recent empirical research on the bystander effect provides a more nuanced outlook than the initial idea that a higher number of people present makes it less likely that anyone would intervene. The bystander effect weakens when social bonds exist between the person needing help and the bystanders (Levine and Manning 2013). Studies of surveillance camera footage of violent episodes indicate that danger sharply increases the likelihood of intervention from bystanders (Liebst et al. 2021; Lindegaard et al. 2021). These findings have in common that a sense of social connectedness and importance can weaken and nullify bystander effects. When we care about those affected by the events in front of us and see that what is happening will have a significant effect on them, we may be more likely to intervene and speak up than if we were witnessing strangers in trouble but not in real danger.

The purpose of this chapter has been to show that knowledge about bystander effects—what causes them as well as what strengthens and weakens them—is highly relevant for efforts to build and maintain a constructive communication climate. Diffusion of responsibility can occur even among the best of colleagues. Pluralistic ignorance can also emerge in settings where colleagues glance at each other, without saying a word. We have seen that it can make sense to appoint a devil’s advocate and a God’s advocate in work settings to place responsibility for making interventions firmly with specific individuals. We have also observed that these roles need to circulate and not stay with the same individuals. Long-serving advocates may have bad days where they are distracted from seeing events clearly or lack energy to speak up. On those days, their silence can be interpreted wrongly as a sign that everything is fine, and therefore no one calls for an intervention. An alternative is to give more people experience in keeping a critical and appreciative eye on proceedings at work and speaking up about what they see, which may serve to mobilise dissent and appreciation that is more authentic in work contexts.