Terms
- Prosocial behavior
- Any act performed with the goal of benefiting another person
- Altruism
- The desire to help another person even if it involves some personal cost to the helper
Why Do We Help?
- Three theoretical categories
- Evolutionary Theories
- e. Genetic Factors * Social Exchange Theories
- e. Desire to ↑ rewards and ↓costs * Empathy and Altrusim
- e. Pure Motive for Helping
Why Do We Help: Evolution
- Kin selection
- Behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection
- The Reciprocity Norm
- The expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future
- Sociobiologists – Survival correlated with developing relationships based on this norm
- Learning Social Norms
- Those who are the best learners of societal norms have a competitive advantage (Simon, 1990)
Why Do We Help: Social Exchange
- Social Exchange Theory
- Behavior stems from the desire to maximize rewards and minimize costs
- How helping is rewarding
- Increase probability others will help us
- Relieve bystander distress
- Gain social approval and increase self-worth
Why Do We Help: Empathy and Altruism
- Empathy and Altruism Hypothesis (Batson)
- Empathy leads to helping, regardless of costs or reward (altruism); no empathy results in behavior in accord with social exchange theory
- Toi and Batson (1982)
- Methods
- Taped interview, student with two broken legs
- IV’s: Instructions (empathetic vs non-empathetic) and cost of helping (high or low)
- DV: Help
- Results
- Empathetic helped when cost was either high or low
- Non-empathetic helped only when cost was low
Theoretical Issues
- Evolutionary
- Difficulty explaining why people sometimes help complete strangers * Social Exchange
- Social exchange theory presumes that people help only when the rewards outweigh the costs.
- Thus social exchange theory presumes that there is no pure altruism.
- Empathy and Altruism
- Empathy may increase the cost of not helping
- Lowers distress over seeing someone suffer
- More in line with social exchange
Factors That Influence Helping Behaviors
- Environmental
- Rural Vs Urban
- Weather
- Bystander Effect * Individual
- Personality
- Gender
- Culture
- Mood
Factors That Influence Helping: Environment
- Rural Vs Urban
- People in rural environments show more helping behavior
- Weather
Factors That Influence Helping: Environment
- Bystander Effect
- As number of bystanders ↑, probability of help ↓
- g. Kitty Genovese
Factors That Influence Helping: Environment
- Bystander Effect – Darley & Latané, 1968
- Methods
- Intercom communication, confederate had a seizure
- IV: Number of participants there
- DV: Helping behavior, time to help
- Results
- As number of participants ↑, helping ↓and reaction time ↑ (took longer to initiate helping behavior)
Factors That Influence Helping: Environment
- Bystander Effect – Explanation * Interpretation of the Event – people interpret events as innocuous when bystanders are present
- Pluralistic ignorance – look for others reactions (informational influence), interpret blank expressions as indicating no danger
- Diffusion of Responsibility
- Personal responsibility = Total responsibility/ # of witnesses
Ways To Increase Helping
- Reduce Ambiguity, Increase Responsibility
- Personalizing bystanders
- Personal request
- Eye contact * Stating one’s name
- Guilt and Concern for Self-Image
- Door-in-the-face technique
- Strategy for gaining a concession
- After someone first turns down a large request, the same requester counteroffers with a more reasonable request * Socializing Altruism
- Teaching moral inclusion
- Moral exclusion
- Perception of certain individuals or groups as outside the boundary within which one applies moral values and rules of fairness
- Moral inclusion
- Regarding others as within one’s circle of moral concern
- Modeling altruism
- Prosocial TV models
- Learning by doing
- Helpful actions promote the self-perception that one is caring and helpful, which in turn promotes further helping