Why Do People Help?
Prosocial Behavior
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
Prosocial behavior is any act
performed with the goal of benefiting
another person.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
Altruism is the desire to help another
person even if it involves a cost to the
helper.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
A basic question that people have
asked is whether people are willing to
help when there is nothing to gain, or if
they only help when there is some
benefit for them.
Theories of Prosocial Behavior
• Evolutionary
• Social exchange
• Empathy-altruism
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and
Genes
Evolutionary Psychology is the attempt to
explain social behavior in terms of genetic
factors that evolved over time, according to
the principles of natural selection.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and
Genes
Darwin recognized that altruistic behavior
posed a problem for his theory: if an
organism acts altruistically, it may
decrease its own reproductive fitness.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and
Genes
The idea of kin selection is the idea that
behaviors that help a genetic relative are
favored by natural selection.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and
Genes
The norm of reciprocity is the expectation
that helping others will increase the
likelihood that they will help us in the
future.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Social Exchange: The Costs and
Rewards of Helping
Social exchange theory argues that much of
what we do stems from the desire to
maximize our outcomes and minimize our
costs. Like evolutionary psychology, it is a
theory based on self-interest; unlike it, it
does not assume that self-interest has a
genetic basis.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Social Exchange: The Costs and
Rewards of Helping
 Helping can be rewarding because
increases the probability that
_____________________
 relieves the _______________of the
bystander
 gains us ___________and increased
______________.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Social Exchange: The Costs and
Rewards of Helping
Helping can also be costly (danger, time,
money); thus it decreases when costs are
high.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive
for Helping
Batson (1991) is the strongest proponent of
the idea that people often help purely out of
the goodness of their hearts.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive
for Helping
He argues that pure altruism is most likely
to come into play when we experience
empathy for the person in need; that is, we
are able to experience events and emotions
the way that person experiences them.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive
for Helping
The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that
when we feel empathy for a person, we will
attempt to help purely for altruistic reasons,
that is, regardless of what we have to gain.
Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive
for Helping
Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive
for Helping
•
•
•
When did people agree to help Carol (who was in auto accident)
w/work missed in Intro Psych? (Toi & Batson,1982)
High empathy: Imagine how Carol felt
Low Empathy: Be objective, don’t be concerned w/ how Carol felt
Altruistic or egoistic motives
• Hard to disentangle
• If feel good after helping someone, was
the motive altruistic or egoistic?
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
Individual Differences: The Altruistic
Personality
Aspects of a person’s makeup that lead the
person to help others in a wide variety of
situations defines the altruistic personality.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
Individual Differences: The Altruistic
Personality
Research has found that the extent to
which people are helpful in one situation is
NOT highly related to how prosocial they
are in another situation.
Personality is not the only determinant of
whether people will help, at least across
many situations.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
Individual Differences: The Altruistic
Personality
It appears that different kinds of people are
likely to help in different types of
situations.
Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior
Eagly and Crowly (1986) found that men
are more likely to help in
________________ways, and women are
more likely to help in
___________involving ________________.
Ex: Men __________to help w/flat tire or in
dangerous situation. (short-term, strangers)
Women _________to help take care of
a neighbor or elderly relative. (longer-term,
close relationships)
Gender differences in receiving help
• Are people more likely to help women
or men? It depends.
– Male helpers are ______likely to help
__________________.
– Female helpers are ______likely to
help______________.
• Women not only receive _____help
from men, but they also ________help.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
Cultural Differences in Prosocial
Behavior
People across cultures are more likely to
help members of their in-group, the group
with which an individual identifies as a
member, than members of the out-group, a
group with which an individual does not
identity.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
Cultural Differences in Prosocial
Behavior
People from collectivist cultures are more
prone to help in-group members and less
likely to help out-group members than are
people from individualist cultures.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
The Effects of Mood on Prosocial
Behavior
People who are in a good mood are more
likely to help.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Good moods can increase helping for
three reasons
 good moods make us interpret events in a
_____________way
helping another _____________________
good moods ___________self-attention, and
this in turn leads us to be ________to behave
according to our values and beliefs.
Feel good, do good
• EXAMPLE: Isen, Clark, & Schwartz, 1976:
• IV: A confederate, who had supposedly spent
her last dime on a wrong number, called people
who had received a free sample of stationery
0-20 minutes earlier or who had not received
a gift.
• DV: Helping=willingness to relay a phone
message
• Results: People who had received a free gift in
the previous 5 mins. were ___________to relay
a message than control subjects who had not
received gift.
Positive Mood: Feel good, do good
• When researchers have induced a good
mood (e.g., leaving dimes in the coin
return slot of a pay phone, giving people
cookies, etc.), they find that people in a
good mood are ___________to help than
those in a “neutral” mood.
•
Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
The Effects of Mood on Prosocial
Behavior
Negative-state relief hypothesis says that
people help in order to alleviate their own
sadness and distress; it exemplifies a
social exchange approach.
Negative mood and helping
• EX: Thompson, Cowan, & Rosenhan, 1980
• IV: Focused on own feelings about their dying
friend or the friend’s feelings (negative mood
was induced)
• DV: Anonymously helping a grad student with
her research
• Results: ___________to help in the otherfocused condition (____%) versus self-focused
condition (___%).
How can a sad mood and a happy mood both lead
to more helping?
• Different reasons
• Sadness: Helping _____________mood.
(But, if we blame others for our bad mood,
sadness is not associated with more
helping.) Complex association.
• Happiness: May trigger
___________about others. May prolong
good mood. Straightforward, consistent
association.
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
Environments: Rural versus Urban
People in rural areas are more helpful. This
effect holds over a wide variety of helping
situations and in many countries.
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
Environments: Rural versus Urban
One explanation is that people from rural
settings are brought up to be more
neighborly and more likely to trust
strangers.
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
The Number of Bystanders: The
Bystander Effect
The bystander effect is the finding that the
greater the number of bystanders who
witness an emergency, the less likely any
one of them is to help.
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
The Number of Bystanders: The
Bystander Effect
Latané and Darley (1970) developed a decision tree
to show how people decide whether to help in an
emergency:
1. Noticing an Event:
Yes
No
2. Interpreting the Event as an Emergency
Yes
No
3. Assuming Responsibility
Yes
No
4. Knowing How to Help
Yes
No
5. Deciding to Implement the Help
Yes
No
Stage 1: Noticing the event
• The Good Samaritan study
Stage 1: Noticing the event
Darley & Batson, 1973 TIME PRESSURE
• IVs: Hurry or No Hurry
•
Topic of talk: Good Samaritan parable or
jobs for seminary students
• DV: Helping a man slumped in doorway
• Results: No hurry condition:
Hurry condition:
Topic of speech was ____________to helping.
Kitty Genovese case
• Was noticing the event a problem?
Stage 2: Interpreting the event as
an emergency
• Smoke-filled room study
– video clip
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
The Number of Bystanders: The
Bystander Effect
Pluralistic ignorance is the phenomenon
whereby bystanders assume that nothing is
wrong in an emergency because no one else
looks concerned. This greatly interferes with
the interpretation of the event as an
emergency and therefore reduces helping.
Kitty Genovese
• Was interpreting the event a problem in
the Kitty Genovese case?
Stage 3: Assuming responsibility
• Recall seizure study (earlier in the course)
• When more people were present,
participants were less likely to help (by
getting the experimenter) and they took
longer to help (if they did help).
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
Stage 3: Assuming responsibility
Diffusion of responsibility is the
phenomenon whereby each bystander’s
sense of responsibility to help decreases as
the number of witnesses increases. This
results in a reduction of helping.
Kitty Genovese
• Was assuming responsibility a problem?
Stage 4: Weighing rewards and costs
• People help when the rewards outweigh the
costs
• Potential rewards
– Reciprocity
– Social approval
– Self-satisfaction
– Reduced guilt and arousal
• Potential costs
– Danger/life threatening
– Financially detrimental
– Embarrassing
– Time consuming
• Kitty Genovese?
Stage 5: Deciding how to
help
• People cannot help if they do not know
how to help.
• Do you know CPR? The Heimlich
maneuver? Your own blood type?
• This is not an issue in the case of Kitty
Genovese.
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
The Nature of the Relationship:
Communal Versus Exchange
Relationships
Communal relationships are those in which
people’s primary concern is with the welfare
of the other, whereas exchange
relationships are governed by equity
concerns.
•
Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior
The Nature of the Relationship:
Communal Versus Exchange
Relationships
Generally we are more helpful
towards_____________________; the
exception occurs when the
______________us in a domain that is
_________________and thus threatens our
self-esteem. (Recall Tesser video)
How Can Helping Be Increased?
• Prosocial role models
• 1--Bryan & Test (1967) L.A. drivers were
____________to offer help to a female
driver with a flat tire if a quarter of a
mile earlier they had witnessed
someone helping another woman
change a tire.
Increasing helping—Prosocial models
• 2—Byran & Test (1967) New Jersey
Xmas shoppers were
___________to drop money into a
Salvation Army kettle if they had
just seen someone else to donate.
Increasing helping—prosocial models
• 3—Rushton & Campbell (1977)
found British adults
____________to donate blood if
they were approached after
observing a confederate agree to
donate.
Media can encourage helping
•
•
•
•
TV programming
NIMH study of Mr. Rogers
4 wks preschool program
Kids from _____________homes became
__________________________________
__________during the 4 wk period than
those who did not see the show.
Increasing helping: Disseminate research findings
• Beaman et al. (1978) Students who had
heard a lecture on bystander intervention
were more likely to help in a staged
emergency 2 wks later.
• Heard lecture _____% helped
• Did not hear lecture ____% helped