Professor Bibb Latané is the author or co-author of more than 140 articles and chapters and a book about his research on bystander intervention in emergencies, social impact and group influence, the causes and consequences of “social loafing,” and other topics. 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.