PSYC227-Week 9

What is prosocial behaviour?

• These are behaviours that are valued by and benefit society

• Helping is an example of prosocial behaviour

What is helpful behaviour?

• A type of prosocial behaviour

• Acts that are intentionally benefit and individual

What is altruism?

• A type of helping behaviour

• Defined by being costly to perform and results in no gain for performer

• Different to helping behaviour in general as there is a cost

What are the 4 main theories for the motive of helping behaviour?

• Evolutionary perspective

• Empathy perspective

• Helping is rewarding perspective

• Altruism vs egoism

What does the evolutionary perspective say about helping behaviour?

• The main claims is that helping behaviour occurs because it provides adaptive advantages by increasing inclusive fitness

• Inclusive fitness is not only passing personal genetic information but the genetic information of genetically related family members

• Helping behaviour helps the genetic family information to be passed onto offspring

  • Not long just focusing on the individual surviving but the whole family

• This occurs through two processes

  • Kin selection

    • Choosing to save those who are more genetically related to you than someone who isn’t

    • Fitzgerald and Colarelli (2009)

      • High risk: help blood related/genetic related rather than a friend

      • Medium risk: help genetic/blood related rather than friend

      • Low risk: no major difference

      • We choose to help those related to us if the cost is large rather than a friend because we want to support the offspring of our family

  • Reciprocal altruism

    • Help others now, so they can help me out later

    • Explain why we help people despite not being related to us - helping can provide adaptive advantage because we may receive help later on

    • There are two types of reciprocity

      • Direct: I have helped someone, and that recipient will help me

      • Indirect: I am generally helpful, so others will help me

What does the empathy perspective say about helping behaviour?

• Main claim: We help others due to empathetic concern

• Empathetic concern refers to the compassion to help someone because of their distress. You are concerned because you see they are in distress and want to alleviate that distress

• There are two types of empathy

  • Cogntive component: ability to understand someone else’s experience, but you are not FEELING it. Intellectually you can understand why someone would feel as such, be you do not feel it as well. Perspective taking

  • Affective component: ability to experience the emotions of others and experience empathetic concern, Other-orientated emotions - you feel what someone else feels

• Warneken and Tomasello (2006)

  • Seen in 18 months old infants as they spontaneously help when seeing others in distress

What does the helping is rewarding perspective say about helping behaviour?

• Main claim: we help others because we get something out of it - other than adaptive advantages (how it distinguishes from evolutionary theory)

• The rewards of helping include

  • greater positive emotion

  • decrease in negative emotion

  • tangible rewards

• Costs of helping

  • Time

  • Risk

  • Resource

  • Emotional costs

  • Opportunity costs

• Costs of NOT helping

  • damage to reputation

  • status

  • anticipated guilt

What is the negative state relief model?

• Cialdini et al., 1987

• Part of helping is rewarding theory

• Helping others makes us feel good

• So we help others to improve our mood

• We use helping others to relieve us of our bad mood because it makes us feel better

What is the arousal-cost reward model?

• Dovido et al., 2006

• More likely to help if the rewards of helping outweigh the costs

• Seeing someone is distress causes a physiological response in us - anxiety, fast heart rate

• Because we feel bad, we help the person in distress to relieve our own arousal

• BUT, before taking action, we weigh the costs and benefits of helping vs not helping

• This is the bystander calculus - as an on looker we weigh up the costs and rewards for helping a person in need

What does the altruism vs egoism perspective say about helping behaviour?

• Central claim: we help other others out of empathetic concern, and sometimes out of selfish concern

• It all comes down to the motive

• This difference in motives is demonstrated in Batson 1991 model, Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

What is the empathy-altruism hypothesis? Batsom, 1991

• First there is a perception that someone needs help

• perception that some on needs help (same for both egoism and altruism) → adopt other’s perspective? Yes? your emotional response is empathetic concert. If you response is empathetic concern you TYPE OF MOTIVE → altruistic → and your motive of seeing REDUCTION OF OTHER’S DISTRESS is satisfied

• If your DO NOT adopt the other’s perspective → EMOTIONAL REPONSE → personal distress → TYPE OF MOTIVE → egotistic → SATISFACTION MOTIVE is reduction of own distress

• So we have

  • perception that someone needs help

  • adopt other’s perspective

  • emotional response

  • type of motive

  • satisfaction of motive

How do interpersonal differences impact helping behaviour?

• There are suggests that certain traits in individuals mean they are more likely to help

  • Spontaneous helping in childhood predicts rates of helping in adulthood

  • Twin studies: 56%-72% heritability ratio for helping (Chiao, 2011)

• Carlo et al (2011) suggests there is a trait empathy and moral reasoning predict prosocial behaviour → higher and more complex moral reasoning = higher trait empathy

• However, parenting practices also predict both empathy and moral reasoning

• So BOTH nature and nurture

What are the gender differences in helping behaviour?

• Men and women both equally likely to help

• HOWEVER

• The difference in genders is the TYPE of HELP, both will have equal chances of helping, however how they help differes

• This may be due to socialisation of gender roles

• Men - emergency situations

• Women - social and community situations

What are the cultural differences in helping behaviour?

• There are two main cultural factors

  • 1. Norms

    • Simpatia - cultural norms in which its is valued to be concerned for the wellbeing of others (Levine et al., 2001)

  • 2. Individualism vs collectivism

    • Leads to different motivations in prosocial behaviour

    • Individualistic - self interest (maybe less likely to help)

    • Collectivist - more likely to help the ingroup compared to the outgroup

What are the 2 factors that increase chances of someone being helped?

• Physical or interpersonal attractiveness

• Those who are similar to us

How does physical attractiveness or interpersonal attraction impact receiving helping behaviour?

• People we are better looking are more likely to be helped

• People how are more interpersonally attractive (good personality) also enhances physical attractiveness which increases the chances of being helped

How does similarity impact receiving helping behaviour?

• See those who are similar as being part of our in-group

• Similar to us, part of our group therefore more likely to help

  • More likely to help someone wearing the same football team jersey (Levine et al., 2005)

What decreases the chances of being helped?

• If someone is seen to be blamed for their circumstances, less likely to get help

  • Homeless, seen as yourself the cause of your homelessness, less likeley for people to help

  • Your a smoker and have lung cancer, less likely to be helped as others percieve that your circumstances are because of your own action

What are the 8 main situational factors that impact helping behaviours?

• Bystander effect

• Time pressure

• Location

• Good mood

• Bad mood

• Role models

• Social influence

• Social connection

What is the bystander effect?

• Failure to help someone in need due to the presences of others

What is the order of the bystander effect?

• 1. Notice something is happening (distracted)

• 2. Interpret the event as an emergency (ambiguous situation, pluristic ignorance)

• 3. Take responsibility for providing help (diffusion of responsibility)

• 4. Decide how to help (lack competence)

• 5. Provide help (audience inhibition, cost vs rewards of helping)

How does time pressure impact helping behaviour?

• People are less likely to help if in a hurry

How does location impact helping behaviour?

• More likely to help if you live in a rural area than compared to urban

• Rural greater sense of connection

• Less likely to get distracted in rural community

• Urban overload hypothesis (Milgram, 1970)

  • More stimulus in urban environments, therefore more likely to miss out on seeing someone who needs help

How does good mood impact helping behaviour?

• Good mood make people more helpful and generous

How does bad mood impact helping behaviour?

• Can increase helping behaviour too

• Help to relieve your own negative mood

• To help in a bad mood need to

  • Take responsibility of your bad mood (other caused it some I am not going to anything)

  • Must focus on the outcome of helping someone, not the costs to self

How do role models impact helping behaviour?

• Role models are important in teaching children about helping

• Observational learning

  • Teaches that helping is valued and rewarded

  • These social norms of helping are then internalised

• Prosocial games correlated with helping

How does social influence impact helping behaviour?

• There may be a pressure to conform

  • increase in helping if it leads to conformity

  • decrease in helping if it means you don’t conform

• Need to maintain reputation

  • help to be seen in good light

How does social connection impact helping behaviour?

• You help because you identify with the people that need help

  • seen after natural disasters

• Brings a sense a humanity

Explain the relationship between volunteering and helping

• Choosing to help at the expense of time or not being paid

• There are two motivations to volunteering

  • Other-focused volunteering

    • altruistic, want to help for the sake of helping others. But not enough of a motivation for help in the long run

  • Self-focused volunteering

    • Egoistic reasons to help, helping others to help yourself. Enough of a motivation to help in the long run especially when costs are high

• however, higher wellbeing and satisfaction outcomes for other-focused motivated volunteers

• Issues with volunteering

  • Too much help means a lot of time and energy spent seeing and processing who can and can’t help

  • Volunteer motivation is high but their experience is low. SO need to match motivation with competence

What impacts the likelihood of volunteering?

• Cottrell, 2011

• Enormity of event (44%)

• Seeing help in need (20)

• Community spirit

What leads to diffusion of responsibility?

• Seen even in imaginary senarios

• Less likely to help due to the assumption someone else will help

• Anominity increases diffusion of responsibility

  • don’t know the victim don;t feel complled to help as you are psychologically distant or not attached to the person

• Presense of others increases diffusion of responsibility

What is audience inhibition?

• Seen online as well

• Reduce chances of helping in the presence of others

• HOWEVER, audience or presences of others increasing helping if NOT HELPING leads to scorn

How does an emergency situation impact the bystander effect?

• Plural ignorance, diffusion of responsibility and audience inhibition not really seen in clear emergency situations

• Because dangerous situations are

  • easier to see that help is needed

  • we need other for physical support - we want an audience

  • can only resolve emergency with the coordination of multiple people

What is reluctant altruism?

• A social influence to help

• Pressure to help

What is purlistic ignorance?

• You look to other people to know when and how to act

• Therefore, you not act because no one else is acting

• Therefore helping behaviour decreases in the presence of passive people

Impacts stage 2 of bystander effect - you do not interpert the situation as a threat becuase no onself is acting as if a emergency, there you do not interpret the emergency

So weaker effect in emergency situations

How can you diminish the bystander effect?

What factors leads to being in a good mood and helping?

What are the factors that lead to being a good mood but no helping?

What are the factors that lead to bad mood and helping?

What are the factors that lead to bad mood and no helping?