Bibb Latané is the author or co-author of more than 140 articles and chapters and a book about his research on social attraction in animals, bystander intervention in emergencies, social impact and group influence, and the causes and consequences of “social loafing,” or the reduction of productivity in groups. His research on the latter topic is featured in detail in Morton Hunt’s Profiles of Social Research, and his book The Unresponsive Bystander (with John Darley) was given a featured retrospective review in Contemporary Psychology.
    According to a recent study, he is the third most frequently cited psychologist in social psychology textbooks, and several terms coined by him (“bystander intervention,” “social loafing,” and “social impact theory”) appear in the Larousse Grande Dictionnaire de la Psychologie and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology. Other areas of research concern stage fright, tipping in restaurants, sex differences in sociability, social comparison, and social attraction in animals. While doing theory-based programmatic research, Latané is an eclectic methodologist using social surveys, computer simulations, and laboratory and field experiments, and publishing in such venues as Physical Review A and the Readers Digest as well as the major psychology journals.

    Latané has twice won the Behavioral Science Award given by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for work on bystander intervention in emergencies and on social loafing. He is also the recipient of the career research awards given by the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, as well as James McKeen Cattell and Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowships.

    Latané is currently working on a dynamic version of his integrative theory of social impact to help account for the regional differentiation and temporal evolution characteristic of linguistic, religious, behavioral and other elements of culture. Conceiving society as a complex self-organizing system of interacting individuals, dynamic social impact theory explains the emergence of four forms of order from the iterative, recursive operation of nonlinear individual social influence processes: the consolidation (reduced diversity), clustering (spatial self-organization), correlation (emergent linkages) and eventual continuing diversity of socially influenceable attributes of spatially distributed individuals. His research has been funded by over $1.4 million in grants from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

    Latané earned his BA in Culture and Behavior at Yale College and his PhD at the University of Minnesota, where he worked in the interdisciplinary Laboratory for Research in Social Relations. He devoted almost a decade during the 1980s to academic administration, serving as Chair of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Director of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, and Director of the Behavioral Science Laboratory at the Ohio State University. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of the Department of Social Psychology at Columbia University.

    In addition to his research contributions, Latané has long been involved in professional activities, having been elected President of both the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Division 8 of APA) and the Midwestern Psychological Association. He has served on the Social Psychology Review Panel of the National Science Foundation and been elected to terms on the governing bodies of the American Psychological Association, the Midwestern Psychological Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

    As President of Social Science Conferences Inc, a public charity devoted to enhancing research and teaching, Latané founded the Nags Head Conference Center which, in its 20+ years of operation in Kill Devil Hills NC and Highland Beach FL, hosted more than 160 scientific conferences, and the Center for Human Science in Chapel Hill, NC, which fosters a community of interdisciplinary graduate students at UNC and sponsors web-based innovations in teaching, research, and publication. In addition, he is or has been a member of UNC's Graduate Education Advancement Board, and the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission.