The Smoky Room and the Gathering Crowd

Imagine you’re in a room and it starts to fill with smoke. It’s just a little at first but you can see it creeping in through the vents. The other people with you in the room seem unalarmed. When you point it out to them, they just shrug their shoulders. Soon, the air is thick with the smoke and you can no longer clearly see the other people. You appeal to them again but still, nothing. They respond with indifference. They seem completely fine with the situation. What do you do?

This was an experiment run in 1969 by researchers Bibb Latané and John Darley. They were researching the “Bystander effect”, largely in response to the murder of a young woman in New York City which was reported to have been witnessed by 38 people, none of whom intervened or even called the police despite the length of time it took for the crime to be committed (35 minutes). Their research led to the conclusion that bystanders will feel a diminished sense of responsibility in such scenarios if there are several other bystanders nearby. Essentially, every one of the 38 witnesses assumed one of the others would intervene or call the police. And so, no one did anything.¹

Letané and Darley conducted experiments to replicate something akin to this scenario and the results bore out this conclusion. However, the Smoke Room experiment, described above, was a step further. In this experiment, they shifted the danger from a third party to the observer themselves (the subject of the experiment). Surely, if a person felt they were the one at risk, they wouldn’t fail to raise the alarm?

So, the two researchers took a volunteer and put them in a waiting room and asked them to fill out a questionnaire. They placed two actors in the room to also fill out questionnaires. Then, they released the smoke which, although harmless, was an irritant that would cause you to cough. The two actors would remain completely indifferent to the smoke and show no concern. The naive subject, however, was free to act. What would they do?

The experiment was run several times, with several subjects, and, in the end, most of them, although visibly alarmed at the start, simply went back to quietly filling in their questionnaires. The indifference of their companions quelled whatever concerns they had about the smoke. As Psychotherapist Lauren Slater says about the experiment, in her excellent book Opening Skinner’s Box:

“They decided, based on the social cues of the confederates, rather than the material evidence, to interpret the emergency as a harmless failure of the air-conditioning system, and under the spell of that story, they just hacked away until many minutes had passed, and there was a fine white film in their hair and on their lips, and the examiner came in and called it off.”²

This conclusion is reinforced when you consider the results that were obtained when they ran the experiment with subjects who were put in the room entirely by themselves. In those instances, the subjects almost always recognised the smoke as an emergency and quickly left the room to report it. With no one to influence them, they didn’t doubt themselves and proceeded to act instinctively.

It’s a fascinating experiment because it demonstrates clearly something we don’t like to admit: that we are passively, but heavily, influenced by the actions of those around us in a way that we barely perceive. Even with our lives possibly at risk, when we should know better, we find it hard to go against the prevailing consensus of the crowd. We assume the crowd must be right no matter how much it goes against our own beliefs or instincts. The whole room might be on fire but if everyone else is acting like it’s not, who am I to argue?

Now, imagine you’re a scientist who works for a large pharmaceutical company. You work on developing and producing medicines. A worldwide pandemic breaks out and you take it seriously because you know a bit about this kind of thing. Then, there is talk of a vaccine. “No,” you think, “it’ll be a long time before that’s ready.” From your work, you know that it usually takes about a decade to develop, test, and mass produce a new vaccine. But, you watch amazed as a brand new technology, utilising messenger RNA, is developed in just months that seeks to recode cells in your body to produce spike protein, a signature characteristic of the virus. (Later, you find out it actually took only two days to develop.) Nothing like this has ever been done before and the scientist in you is impressed and even a little jealous not to be involved. But, as for taking the vaccine yourself? No. “Far too soon for that”, you think. “It’ll be years before I knew it was safe enough.”

This isn’t an imagined scenario. It describes several actual conversations with several different scientists late last year, to which I was privy. All of these science professionals, removed from the kind of societal, academic, and government pressure that soon followed, couldn’t conceive of taking a new, unapproved, vaccine utilising novel cell technology. Everything they knew told them to wait.

And what became of these scientists?

Well, they all got vaccinated, of course.

A scientist lives in a world that starts rolling out an unapproved, new vaccine technology with no long-term safety data. She is very wary of it but no one else is. She tries to raise her concerns, but no one is interested. Everyone around her acts like it is completely normal to take such a product. The TV tells her it is a normal thing to do too and so does the government. Soon, even her colleagues act the same way, her mentors. They are unconcerned, unalarmed. Everyone takes it. Even the children, even the pregnant women. Are they all wrong?

What does the scientist do?

We already know the answer, don’t we?

She quietens down and fills in her questionnaire.

It’s clear that it’s hard to go against a crowd, even a small one. What is also clear, or should be at this stage, is that the crowd today, birthed by Covid and backed by media, government, Big Tech, and every major institution imaginable, is the biggest crowd the world has ever seen. Maybe, your pre-existing beliefs and values match up to this crowd and you made your choices legitimately and coherently. If so, then I guess you have nothing to worry about. But for the rest of us, or for those who simply aren’t sure anymore, it’s important that we try to remember how we thought and what we believed before this crowd tried to swallow us whole.

1. There were subsequent investigations which challenged the idea that none of the witnesses tried to call the police. Regardless, the murder and the reported lack of intervention at the time was the motive for pursuing the research subsequently considered in this essay.

2. Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box, Bloomsbury, 2004, p. 105