  The dependence of inclusive weak decay rates of heavy hadrons on light
spectator quarks is considered. The analysis of a previous work on relating the
effects in b baryons to those in charmed baryons is extended to explicit
evaluation of the matrix elements of certain four-quark operators over heavy
baryons. It is shown that the usually postulated color antisymmetry of these
matrix elements is significantly broken. The flavor-singlet shift of inclusive
decay rates of b baryons due to the spectator effects is shown to be strongly
suppressed in the leading-log approximation. Combined with the results for the
flavor non-singlet splittings, this observation allows to argue, in a less
model-dependent way, than before, that within the present understanding of the
spectator effects it is highly unlikely that the lifetimes of the Lambda_b and
the B_d can be split by more than 10%.
