"[A]wareness of Tarasoff and the belief that it is legally or ethically binding has a consistent and noticeable influence across professions in one situation: warning the potential victim. Beliefs also seem to have a positive influence in two other areas: including notes about the patient and recommending voluntary hospitalization. There is a very small difference with regard to initiating involuntary hospitalization.

There are two points about these differences in hospitalization and note taking practices. First, the hospitalization and note interventions are not uniform: with regard to hospitalizations, ethically bound social workers and psychologists are more likely than legally bound ones to have initiated involuntary hospitalization, and ethically bound therapists in each profession were at least as likely as legally bound ones to recommend voluntary hospitalization. With regard to making notes, social workers show no patterns of influence. Second, and most importantly, most of the differences that do exist are quite small. The largest difference is in terms of warning practices between legally bound psychiatrists and those who reject or are ignorant of Tarasoff: a difference of sixteen percentage points. However, comparable differences for psychologists and social workers are seven points in each case.

To understand more clearly how Tarasoff has influenced actual behavior, however, we must examine ... interventions in cases involving threats. The Tarasoff case involved a patient who threatened an identified person. Therapists may therefore view Tarasoff as dealing with threatening patients specifically rather than dangerous patients generally. Indeed, this view is the emerging judicial interpretation: therapists have not been held liable to victims of their patients when the victim could not have been identified beforehand. When we look to cases involving threats, beliefs about Tarasoff do have consistent patterns of influence with respect to warning and, more importantly, the differences between the groups are greater. With regard to warning, there is a twenty-eight point difference among psychiatrists, a fourteen point difference among psychologists, and a nineteen point difference among social workers, between those believing themselves legally bound by Tarasoff and those who reject or have not heard of it. Differences in note taking and involuntary hospitalization also exist between polar groups.

These data suggest that Tarasoff has influenced therapists' behavior most markedly in situations which gave rise to the case in the first instance, threatening behavior. This conforms to our earlier findings that therapists believed that the case required warning. It also suggests that [the] respondents tend to read the case narrowly; that is, that Tarasoff requires particular interventions with regard to the threatening patient specifically, rather than the dangerous patient generally." [Daniel J. Givelbe, William J. Bowers and Carolyn L. Blitch, "Tarasoff, Myth And Reality: an Empirical Study of Private Law in Action," 1984 Wis. L. Rev. 443, 480-483]