IB PSYCHOLOGY MIDTERM STUDIES

Pilliavin et. al.- AROUSAL COST REWARD MODEL - CLOA/BYSTANDERISM

• Field experiment on the New York City subway system to investigate factors in bystanderism by staging a collapse on a subway train in which an actor who appeared to be either drunk or ill fell down, in need of assistance 

• Researchers manipulated variables in each trial and then observed helping helping behavior in an opportunity sample who happened to be riding the subway at the time 

• 2 conditions 

  • Condition 1- victim appeared to be drunk, smelling like alcohol and holding a bottle in a brown paper bag 

  • Condition 2- victim appeared to be ill and was holding a cane 

• Another researcher acted as the role model who was there to prompt helping behavior in some conditions of the experiment

• 95% of participants helped the cane carrying victim vs. 50% helped the drunk victim

  • Drunk victim is helped less because the perceived cost is greater

    • Likely to cause disgust, embarrassment, or harm 

    • Cost of not helping is less because nobody will blame someone else for not helping a drunk, since a drunk may be perceived as partly responsible for their own victimisation 

  • Diffusion of responsibility is NOT found in the cane-carrying condition because the cost of not helping is high and the cost of helping is low 

• Strengths: Being in real world→ high ecological validity, multi-ethnic sample

• Limitations: issues of generalisability as only certain types of people ride the subway at a given time, ethics were compromised as no consent was given or debrief, participants may have experienced stress, some behaviors may have been missed because of the crowd, some participants may have experienced the procedure more than once 

Darley & Batson- AROUSAL COST REWARD MODEL/BYSTANDERISM

• field experiment that was run over 3 days was to investigate if participants would help a stranger that needed help

  • Helping the stranger came at a COST because they were under time pressure to get to a meeting→ helping would force them to deviate from original plan (be late)

• People encountering someone in need of help when they are in a hurry would be less likely to offer air than persons who are in a hurry (hypothesis) 

• Participants: male seminary students 

  • Deceived in that they were told that they were participating in a study on religious education and vocations 

  • Placed in either a “high-hurry” condition and an "intermediate hurry condition” or a “low-hurry condition” in directions to reach another building 

• IV: the degree to which the participants were told to hurry

• DV; whether and how the participants helped the victim

• When participants passed through the alley the victim was sitting slumped over in a doorway, head down, and eyes closed, not moving 

  • If participant stopped and asked- victim would say everything is ok 

  • If participant offered helped they were allowed to do so and thanked 

• RESULTS: helping was significantly influenced by the time pressure manipulation 

  • Those in “no hurry” condition were more helpful than those in the "intermediate hurry: condition, those in the “hurry condition” were the least helpful. 

CRITICAL THINKING
-field experiment: high ecological validity- people experience being in a hurry all the time  

-participants randomly assigned to conditions: internal validity was high because any difference found between conditions was a result of manipulation of the IV

- ethics: 

Deceiving  the participants

Emotional conflict– anxiety

Park and Shin-

• Influence of anonymous peers on prosocial behavior

  • Investigate influence of social cognitive theory in an experiment manipulating peer influence to see the effects on prosocial behavior

  • Lab experiment 

  • 125 male and female South Korean undergraduates 

  • IVs

    • Indirect peer influence (through media)

    • Direct peer influence (through direct contact with another person)

  • Researchers hypothesized that direct peer modeling would have greater influence on prosocial behavior than indirect modeling 

  • Three confederates were seated in seats closed to the door 

  • Participants read a set of paragraphs 

    • depending upon the experimental condition, the paragraphs either were neutral, or had a prosocial message which was meant to manipulate indirect peer influence

  • Then completed a questionnaire verifying that they read the paragraphs 

  • the experimenter informed participants that the experiment was over and told them about the signature campaign and charity donation for sick children and stressed that they were not required to participate

    • participants were paid for their participation and were deliberately given more money than the study had advertised so that each participant had enough to donate something to charity if they chose to 

  • In the neutral model condition the confederates simply left, while in the prosocial model condition they each signed the signature campaign sheet and put some money in the donation box by the door- this was meant to manipulate direct peer influence

  • Anonymous prosocial models had a considerable influence on prosocial behavior  while the indirect modelling of the prosocial paragraph did not

• Dependent variable was operationalised as a signature campaign and monetary donation so it was able to be measured 

• Both groups were told the same thing about donating, so each group had the same obligation to contribute their money 

Nook et al. - PROMOTING PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR/SLOA

• 102 people from Amazon Mechanical Turk 

  • were paid $1 bonus that they could choose to donate to charity

• Participants completed 100 charity donation trials online, with each trial consisting of a charity logo with a sliding scale underneath for the amount of the donation 

  • After each trial, participants saw what they thought was the average donation by the rest of the group, but was in fact the manipulation of the group norms by the experimenters

  • Two conditions: (1) the generous group norm displayed burying conditions, with a mean of $0.75 (2) the stingy group norm displayed varying donations, with a mean of $0.25

• The participants donated more in the generous norm condition than in the stingy norm condition 

• Donations steadily increased in the generous norm condition, not in the stingy condition

• Individuals may imitate the generous or stingy behaviors they see in others, and therefore prosocial behavior may be motivated by conformity. The participants wanted to ‘fit in’ so they followed what the others did.

Warneken and Tomasello- BLOA/INBORN ALTRUISM

• Participants: infants who were presented with 10 different situations in which an adult confederate needed help achieving a goal 

• 4 types of situation:

  • Out-of-reach objects, such as the adult dropping a marker on the floor 

  • Physical obstacles, like trying to put magazines into a cabinet when the doors are closed 

  • Wrong results, such as a book being placed on top of a stack and then falling off

  • Wrong means, including dropping a spoon into a box and then trying to grab it through a small hole instead of a large flap 

• For each situation there was an experimental and control condition 

  • Experimental condition- clear that there was a problem that needed help 

  • Control condition- same task was altered slightly to indicate the help was not needed

• Results: 22/24 infants helped at least once, and 84% of the help happened before the the adult made eye contact or asked for help 

Conclusion: Because the infants were able to distinguish between situations that did and did not require help, the researchers concluded that this suggests that humans have a natural inclination to altruism, which suggests an evolutionary origin to altruism.