L6 Intergroup Helping

Social Psychology

Charity

• The country in which an individual is most likely to donate is Indonesia (very frequently one of the top donating countries in the world) 

• Women tend to donate more than men

• People tend to donate more as they get older

• Most donations go to overseas disasters

Warneken and Tomasello, 2006

Research by Warneken and Tomasello, 2006 demonstrates that we are born predisposed to help others (Born good: baby morality)

• Are children helping or playing?

• Are they helping because there’s nothing else to do?

• Does this count as altruism?

• If altruism is intrinsic in children, why doesn’t it carry through to adulthood?

Jessica McClure Morales

Became famous at the age of 18 months after falling into a well in her aunt’s backyard on October 14, 1987. Between that day and October 16, rescuers worked nonstop for 58 hours to free her from the eight-inch well casing 22 feet below the ground. The story gained worldwide attention and later became the subject of a 1989 television movie Everybody's Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure. As presented in it, a vital part of the rescue was the use of the then relatively new technology of waterjet cutting.

U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA 2012; 2013)

• Disasters occur everyday

• Over 4 billion people need aid around the world

• Humanitarian disasters on the increase due to climate change and political conflict in the Middle East

World Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO 2015)

 statement on world food insecurity 

• Around 733 million people suffer from hunger, starvation, and malnutrition at any moment in time. 2.3 billion people struggle with food insecurity 

Most countries and governments only donate a small percentage of their GDP to helping victims overseas (less than 0.8% in the UK)

Only 6 countries in the G20 group also in the top 20 for giving; i.e. wealth does not always predict helping 

Defining altruism – Is empathy the key?

Batson and colleagues conducted a series of studies in the 1980s/90s on empathic concern. They define empathy as feeling concern and distress for another.

Batson et al. propose an ‘empathy-altruism’ hypothesis, i.e. altruism is directly linked to empathy and can be demonstrated via empathic concern.

Batson et al, 1983

1. Participants see confederate take 10 ‘painful’ electric shocks

2. Dishevelled confederate tells P that he/she had a traumatic childhood experience with shocks

3. Participants report how they feel and split into two groups, egotistic concern vs empathic concern

4. Experimenters ask participants if they want to take the remaining shocks and stay until the end of experiment

5. Those high in egotistic concern left when able, those high in empathy stayed even if they didn’t have to

6. Batson et al. argue that this is evidence of altruism

Fulz, Batson et al (1986)

conducted experiment to manipulate empathy directly

1. Participants read two notes by student confederate about themselves

2. In note 1 the confederate says they feel out of place, in note 2 they say they need a friend and ask if the participant wants to hang out (same sex)

3. Empathy manipulated (participants either told to read objectively or to focus to how the other person felt)

4. Participant responses were either anonymous or not anonymous

5. Regardless, there was a main effect of empathy – participants in the empathy condition were more likely to volunteer for the confederate (as a buddy/mentor, presumably)

These results support the empathy-altruism hypothesis and seem to rule out experimenter demand characteristics 

Criticisms of empathy mediating

1. Cialdini, 1997 – studies don’t refute the negative-state relief model because participants high in empathic concern may be motivated to help because they will feel bad otherwise; therefore, it’s still a selfish motivation.

2. Cialdini, 1997 – other variables might matter more depending on the situation. Support for the empathy-altruism hypothesis would be stronger if other variables were investigated simultaneously alongside empathy. They found that perceived one-ness with the victim was a stronger predictor than empathic concern.

3. Task instructions on the Batson study are also questionable, e.g. how would you react if instructed to behave ‘objectively’ and ‘detached’? How would you react if told to behave with ‘empathy’ and listen to ‘feelings’?

4. Batson inadvertently measured empathic concern towards ingroup victims, e.g. the confederate was a fellow student at the same uni, on the same course. Think about the donation figures earlier, does empathic concern only manifest itself for ingroup victims? Cikara et al, 2011 - the lack of empathy is a sign of intergroup failure. 

“One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.”

Empathy and the identifiable victim effect 

The identifiable victim effect may be one of the reasons Baby Jessica received so much help.

IVE has demonstrated repeatedly that people prefer to donate to a single identifiable victim (like Jessica) than to a group of victims 

Kogut & Ritov (2005)

• Participants shown a charity ad to raise money for children in medical need in Israel

• Participants donated more money to save one sick child (Rokia) than 8 children

• Participants reported more distress and concern for Rokia than for the group 

But is it just a naming effect?

In the “I” of the storm: Shared initials increase disaster donations 

People prefer their own initials to other letters, influencing preferences in many domains. The “name letter effect” (Nuttin, 1987) may not apply to negatively valenced targets if people are motivated to downplay or distance themselves from negative targets associated with the self. 

• Individuals who shared an initial with the hurricane name were overrepresented among hurricane relief donors 

• This finding suggests that people may seek to ameliorate the negative effects of a disaster when there are shared characteristics between the disaster and the self 

Kogut and Ritov (2007)

• Replicated the effect by asking participants to donate to tsunami victims

• Gave names to all victims (to rule out IVE being due to naming)

• Participants donated more to help a single named victim

• Participants also reported more concern

• But, effect was only present when victim was an ingroup member

Small et al (2007)

• Tried to remove the effect by telling participants about IVE at the start of the experiment

• Participants then choose whether to donate to a single identifiable victim or to a group of victims

• Participants just gave less to both single victims and groups (became less pro-social) 

What causes the Identifiable Victim Effect?

Jenni and Lowenstein (1997)

• Replicated the IVE paradigm but measured a number of plausible explanatory variables (perceived impact of donation, vividness of the victim’s situation, and empathy) 

• Found that the IVE effect was explained by a proportion effect rather than vividness (participants were more likely to make a utilitarian decision for a group) 

Erlandsson et al (2015)

• Found that the IVE effect was due to increased empathic concern towards a single victim

• Argued that this was due to increased vividness of their plight 

Lee and Feeley, 2017 

• Found that emotion mediates helping

• Manipulating emotion was found to increase helping 

Peter Oborne

How the Ukraine war exposes Western racism – Peter Oborne

• The flag of Ukraine is much more readily recognizable than the flag of Yemen 

• If the Western media had given 1/100th of the attention to Yemen as they had to Ukraine, then perhaps more progress could’ve been made in the 7 years that this has been going on.

Helping the outgroup - Nuestra Culpa?

Basil, Ridgeway and Basil (2006)

• Manipulated built and empathy (2 x 2 design)

• Guilt had a strong effect on intention to donate

• Guilt → +Responsibility → +Prosociality

• Replicated in 2008 → guilt mediated empathy

James & Zagefka (2017) 

• Predicted different process for helping ingroup/outgroup members

• H1: main effect of victim ingroup on hypothetical donation, p = 0.007

• H2: no main effect of perpetrator ingroup on hypothetical donation, p = 0.281 

• H3: ingroup perpetrator and ingroup victim interaction most generous M= $6.88, p= 0.006

• H1: main effect of victim ingroup on empathy, p = 0.005

• H2: no main effect of perpetrator ingroup on empathy, p = 0.071

• H3: ingroup perpetrator and ingroup interaction, p = 0.057

There needs to be some sort of notion that you or your group are responsible for empathy effects to emerge. 

Helping is influenced by perceived social norms

Participants care about perceived responsibility and show strategic motives – e.g. individual/group reputation

• Thorton et al, 1991 – participants donate less (frequency and amount) if solicitation method is anonymous regardless of framing, e.g. whether an image was used

• Clark, 2002 – asked participants to make a small donation over 10 trial. Telling participants about the overall donation amount did not increase donations, but giving info on individual donations caused an increase 

• Fehr and Gachter, 2002 – not donating in a cooperation game led to punishments and negative evaluations from other participants 

• Andreoni and Petri, 2004 – participants increased donations by 59% if their identity was visible alongside their donation amount. Just making identity known had no effect. Anonymity decreased donations.

• Barclay, 2004; 2012 – making large donations leads to positive evaluations and is a sign of political leadership 

Research in psychology demonstrates the importance of reputation

• Grace and Griffin, 2006 – participants give more when asked to wear a charity ribbon – West (2004) calls this “conspicuous compassion”

• Alpizar et al, 2008; 2013 – donors in a park in Costa Rica donated  more when with friends than alone. In general, donors donate less if situation is anonymous 

• Reyniers and Bhalla, 2013 – participants display “reluctant altruism” – they are more likely to give when with peers, but they give less than if anonymous 

  • When people donate anonymously, they donate more (they care more about the cause)

  • More people donate non-anonymously, but donate less (reluctance) 

The strategic side of outgroup helping 

“It’s not that we help the outgroup less, it’s more that we help them for different reasons” (James & Zagefka, 2017) 

Strategic motives for helping the outgroup can be explained as follows

1. Helping in an intergroup context places the groups needs in the forefront (SIT)

2. SIT asserts that groups wish to maintain positive distinctiveness. However, group memberships are fluid and groups need to cooperate frequently if they wish to do well.

3. The ingroup must often help the outgroup for the benefits such helping provides, e.g. benefits to the group’s reputation as being fair and trustworthy. 

The struggle for social dominance

There are two types of help (Nadler, 2002)

• Dependency-oriented → a full solution to the problem is provided. The target is perceived as incapable

• Autonomy-oriented → help is partial and temporary. The focus is on helping the target to help themselves. 

High-status groups may prefer to give dependency-oriented help, particularly when group hierarchies are unstable. Lower status groups may refuse such help (perceived as handouts). 

Nadler and Halabi, 2006

argue that helping relations are inherently unequal.

• Helping is associated with resources, knowledge and skills (i.e. power and status)

• The act of helping puts the helper in a position ‘above’ the person in need

• Helping affirms/re-affirms the helper’s position 

Ingroup strategic motives for helping the outgroup

Three motives for ingroups helping outgroups (Van Leeuwen and Tabuer, 2010)

1. Power and autonomy

2. Meaning and existence

3. Impression formation

1. Power and autonomy

Power and autonomy refers to the ingroup wanting to maintain a hierarchical relationship, e.g. ‘over-helping’ (Gilbert & Silvera, 1999) which can cause more stress than not being helped (Schnieder et al, 1996)

2. Meaning and existence

valued and needed, e.g. the “Scrooge effect” (Jonas et al, 2002) Van Leeuwen, 2007 – appeals to collective pride of Dutch participants more effective than guilt appeals, especially for high-identifiers.

3. Impression formation

Impression management refers to ways that helping makes our group appear positive, e.g. by demonstrating that our nation is fair, egalitarian, and competent (Nick Hopkins Scots vs English)