Why Do People Help?
Prosocial Behavior
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
Prosocial behavior is any act
performed with the goal of benefiting
another person, regardless of motive.
Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial
Behavior
Altruism is the desire to help another
person even if it involves a cost to the
helper.
Defining Prosocial Behavior
•Prosocial
Behavior
•Benevolence
•Pure
Altruism
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of
Behavior
Definition
Example
•Prosocial
Behavior
•Benevolence
•Pure
Altruism
From Simpson, 2004
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of
Behavior
•Prosocial
Behavior
•Benevolence
Definition
Example
•Any
action
intended to
benefit
another
(regardless
of motive)
•Giving a
large tip to
a waiter to
impress
your boss
•Pure
Altruism
From Simpson, 2004
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of
Behavior
•Prosocial
Behavior
•Benevolence
•Pure
Altruism
Definition
Example
•Benefits
another
intentionally
for no
external
reward
•Sending
$20 to a
charity to
make
yourself
feel good
From Simpson, 2004
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of
Behavior
•Prosocial
Behavior
•Benevolence
•Pure
Altruism
Definition
Example
•Benefits
another
intentionally
for no
external or
internal
reward
•Jumping
on a
railroad
track to
help a
stranger
who has
fallen
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.
[Suggests can pass on genes by helping
genetic relatives have children or by
helping their children survive.]
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.
[Suggests reciprocity may increase likelihood of
survival.]
Evaluation of Evolutionary
approach
• Although theorists can tell a story about
evolutionary reasons for helping, we
cannot know for sure whether helping has
an evolutionary basis.
• Retrospective explanations, no hard
evidence.
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 someone
will help us in return
 relieves the personal distress of the
bystander
 gains us social approval and increased
self-worth.
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
Is it altruism? Why or why not?
• exercise
Altruistic or egoistic motives?
• It is often difficult to disentangle whether
people are helping for altruistic or egoistic
motives.
– If someone feels joy after helping, is that an
egoistic motive?
•
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.
*High altruism scores not a good predictor
of helping
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 and Helping
• Women are universally perceived as kinder, more softhearted, and more helpful.
• But over 90% of Carnegie Hero awards go to men
(for saving, or attempting to save, the life of
another). Why?
•
--Women are more likely to help those they
already know.
•
--Men are more likely to help strangers in
emergency situations.
From Simpson, 2004
Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior
Ex: Men > likely to help w/flat tire or in
dangerous situation. (short-term, strangers)
Women > likely 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 more likely to help women than
men.
– Female helpers are equally likely to help men and
women.
• Women not only receive more help from
men, but they also SEEK more 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
sympathetic way
helping another prolongs the good mood
good moods increase self-attention and this in
turn leads us to be more likely to behave
according to our values and beliefs (and most
of us value altruism).
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 more likely 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
• Variety of studies show that, when people
feel sad, they are more likely to help (e.g.,
donate money to a charity).
Presence of Sadness
• Helping can be increased by events that
trigger temporary sadness:
• Reminiscing about unhappy experiences
• Reading depressing statements
• Failing at a task
• Witnessing harm to another
From Simpson, 2004
AGE
• Young children are LESS likely to
help when in a sad mood.
• They have not yet learned that
helping another can produce good
feelings.
From Simpson, 2004
How can a sad mood and a happy mood both lead
to more helping?
• Different reasons
• Sadness: Helping may improve temporary
sadness. (But, if we blame others for our
bad mood, sadness is not associated with
more helping.) Complex association.
• Happiness: May trigger positive thoughts
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
Or, it might be that people living in cities
are overwhelmed with too much
stimulation; if you put them in a calmer
environment, they might be just as
likely to help.
Situational Determinants of Prosocial
Behavior
• Field studies conducted in 36 cities in the
U.S.
• The more densely populated the area, the
less likely people were to help.
• Location (rural or urban) more important
than whether person grew up in small
town or large city.
•
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: ____helped
Hurry condition: ___ helped
• 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
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?
• These were 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
Communal/exchange distinction means that
generally we are more helpful towards
friends (> likely to be communal) than
strangers; the exception occurs when the
other is beating us in a domain that is
personally important and thus threatens our
self-esteem. (Recall Tesser video)
How Can Helping Be Increased?
• Prosocial role models
• 1--Bryan & Test (1967) L.A. drivers for
more likely 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 more likely 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 more willing 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 less educated homes became
more cooperative, helpful, likely to state
their feelings 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 43% helped
• Did not hear lecture 25% helped