Helping behaviour

actions intended to provide some benefit to or improve the situation of others

What motivates people to help others?

Four main reasons:

•prosocial behaviours help our groups survive: the evolutionary perspective

•because we care: empathy-altruism hypothesis

•to avoid negative emotions: the negative-state-relief model

•prosocial social norms: role of group processes

Evolutionary perspective

•Kinship selection: we are more likely to do things that further the gene pool, even at expense of our own wellbeing

•an evolutionary urge to favour those with closer genetic relatedness - DeBruine, 2002

Altruism-Egoism Debate

•do we help others or do we help ourselves?

•egoistically motivated helping vs altruistically motivated helping

•altruism - if someone feels empathy towards someone they will help, regardless of what they gain

•egoism- witnessing distress causes unpleasant mood in observer, who is motivated to act to reduce this mood (Negative state relief model)

Bystander effect

•Kitty Genovese murder, 38 witnesses

•likelihood of any person helping in an emergency situation decreases as the number of other bystanders increase

Diffusion of responsibility

•Latane & Darley 1968

•the process by which responsibility is divided between the number of bystanders - more people, less individual responsibility

Pluralistic ignorance

•Latane & Rodin 1969

•emergency bystanders look to others in reacting to the event, if people dont react they interpret the event as not requiring a response

Audience inhibition

•bystanders may fear embarrassment by their actions, resulting in a lower likelihood of them helping

•feel they lack the competence to help

Cost and rewards of helping

•Pilivian et al - help on subway

•the arousal: cost-reward model

-motivational costruct

-cognitive, decision-making components

-concept of we-ness

Common ingroup identity model

•if members of a group can see themselves as a member of a common group, then hostility and bias between groups can be reduced and prosocial behaviours increased - Gaertner et al 1993

•football shirt experiment -more likely to help ingroup members

•