Chapter 11
Prosocial Behavior:
Why Do People Help?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
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Prepared By
Fred W. Whitford
Montana State University
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Chapter Outline
I. Basic Motives Underlying
Prosocial Behavior: Why Do
People Help?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
Prosocial behavior is any act
performed with the goal of benefiting
another person.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
Altruism is the desire to help another
person even if it involves a cost to
the helper.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts
and Genes
Simon (1990) suggests that those who are
the best learners of societal norms have a
competitive advantage, and that one
important societal norm is altruism.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Social Exchange: The Costs and
Rewards of Helping
Helping can be rewarding in three ways: it
can increase the probability that someone
will help us in return; it can relieve the
personal distress of the bystander; and it
can gain us social approval and increased
self-worth.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Social Exchange: The Costs and
Rewards of Helping
Helping can also be costly; thus it
decreases when costs are high.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Empathy and Altruism: The Pure
Motive for Helping
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
• Empathy and Altruism: The Pure
Motive for Helping
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Chapter Outline
II. Personal Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior: Why Do
Some People Help More Than
Others?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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. Clearly, personality is
not the only determinant of whether people
will help, at least across many situations.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• Gender Differences in Prosocial
Behavior
Eagly and Crowly (1986) found that men
are more likely to help in chivalrous, heroic
ways, and women are more likely to help in
nurturant ways involving long-term
commitment.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• The Effects of Mood on Prosocial
Behavior
People who are in a good mood are more
likely to help.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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 sympathetic way; helping
another prolongs the good mood; and good
moods increase self-attention, and this in
turn leads us to be more likely to behave
according to our values and beliefs.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Chapter Outline
III. Situational Determinants of
Prosocial Behavior: When Will
People Help?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Situational Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• Environments: Rural versus Urban
An alternative hypothesis, by Milgram
(1970), is the urban overload hypothesis,
the idea that people living in cities are likely
to keep to themselves in order to avoid
being overloaded by all the stimulation they
receive.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Situational Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• The Number of Bystanders: The
Bystander Effect
Latané and Darley (1970) developed a step-by-step
description of how people decide whether to help in
an emergency:
1. Noticing an Event
2. Interpreting the Event as an Emergency
3. Assuming Responsibility
4. Knowing How to Help
5. Deciding to Implement the Help
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Situational Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• The Number of Bystanders: The
Bystander Effect
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Situational Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• The Number of Bystanders: The
Bystander Effect
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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
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.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Situational Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• The Nature of the Relationship:
Communal Versus Exchange
Relationships
Generally we are more helpful towards
friends than strangers; the exception
occurs when the other is beating us in a
domain that is personally important and
thus threatens our self-esteem.
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Chapter Outline
IV. How Can Helping Be
Increased?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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How Can Helping Be Increased?
People do not always want to be helped. If
being helped means that they appear
incompetent, they will often suffer in
silence, even at the cost of failing at the
task. The goal of helping is to make it
supportive, highlighting concern for the
recipient; watch out when administering
aid that may threaten the other person’s
self-esteem.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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How Can Helping Be Increased?
• Increasing the Likelihood that
Bystanders Will Intervene
Simply being aware of the barriers to
helping can increase people’s chances of
overcoming them. For example, people
who heard a lecture on bystander
intervention were more likely to help
someone compared to people who did not
hear the lecture.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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How Can Helping Be Increased?
• Positive Psychology and Prosocial
Behavior
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is the difference between
prosocial behavior and altruism?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
How does the theory of
evolutionary psychology explain
altruism?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is the basic assumption of
social exchange theory as it
relates to helping behavior?
How is helping others
rewarding? How is helping
others costly?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
How does the empathy-altruism
hypothesis explain altruistic
behavior? What are experimental
strategies used to test the
strength of this hypothesis?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What are three main motives that
could explain prosocial
behavior?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is the altruistic personality?
What other factors are important
for predicting prosocial
behavior?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
How do males and females differ
in the area of prosocial
behavior?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What cultural differences in
prosocial behavior exist?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
When and why do people in a
good mood help others?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is the negative-state relief
hypothesis and what does it
attempt to explain?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
What aspects of the social
situation are important for
prosocial behavior to occur?
What is the relationship between
population size and prosocial
behavior?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
How does the urban-overload
hypothesis explain the greater
likelihood of prosocial behavior
in towns of certain population
sizes?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
What are the five steps that depict
what people consider when
deciding whether to intervene in
an emergency? What influences
whether people will continue
through the steps and eventually
help?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
Why does the presence of other
people influence people’s
interpretation of an event as an
emergency? How does
informational social influence
lead to the bystander effect?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
How do motives to help differ in
exchange versus communal
relationships?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What are strategies to increase
prosocial behavior? What factors
are important to consider when
attempting to make prosocial
behavior more common?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.