Social Relations: Altruistic/Prosocial & Aggressive/Antisocial Behaviors

Altruistic & Prosocial Behaviors

  • Prosocial behaviors are actions intended to benefit others.
  • Examples of prosocial behaviors.

Why Do People Help?

  • Influencing factors:
    • Kin Selection: Preferential helping of genetic relatives, increasing the likelihood of shared genes surviving.
    • Reciprocal Altruism: Helping another individual, even at a risk or cost, with the expectation of receiving help in return.
    • Levels of Empathy:
      • Understanding or vicariously experiencing another's perspective and feeling sympathy and compassion.
      • Cognitive component: Perspective-taking, using imagination to see the world through someone else's eyes.
      • Empathic concern: Other-oriented feelings, such as sympathy, compassion, and tenderness.
      • Biology: Witnessing emotions activates neural structures associated with that emotion in the observer's brain.
      • Oxytocin: Boosts cooperative and trusting behaviors.
      • Emotional experience:
    • Rewards:
      • Psychological rewards: Helping often feels good.
        • Volunteer work leads to improvements in psychological well-being and reduced stress.
        • Trauma experiencers seek opportunities to help others to counteract feelings of sadness.
      • Norms: Helping is seen as the right thing to do.
      • Cost-benefit analysis: People help when the potential rewards are high relative to the potential costs.

Motivation

  • Egoistic: Motivated by selfish concerns.
  • Altruistic: Motivated by the desire to increase others' welfare.
  • Batson's Model:
    • Empathic concern leads to altruistic motivation and reduction of others' distress.
    • Personal distress leads to egoistic motivation and reduction of one's own distress.
    • Adoption of Other's Perspective -> Emotional Response -> Type of Motive -> Satisfaction of Motive
  • Volunteering activities as an example.

Who Is Likely to Help? Individual Differences in Helpfulness

  • Helpfulness is relatively stable over time.
  • Preschool helping behavior predicts later helpfulness.
  • Genetically identical twins are more similar in helping tendencies and empathy than fraternal twins.

Personality

  • Agreeableness.
  • Humility.
  • Advanced moral reasoning.
  • Examples of non-Jewish heroes of the Holocaust (Schindler's List).

Gender

  • No consistent general gender difference in helping behavior.
  • Men ask for help less frequently than women.
  • Help-seeking is less socially acceptable for men, threatening self-esteem.

Whom Do People Help?

  • The person in need (perceived by the helper).
  • Personal attractiveness (physical and interpersonal).
  • Attributions: Whether the person seems responsible for their situation.
    • (e.g., homelessness due to drug addiction)
  • Whether some people are more likely to receive help than others, at least in certain situations.
  • Friends and similar others:
    • Feel mutual responsibility for each other's needs (close friends or romantic partners; communal).
    • Give help with the expectation of receiving comparable benefits in return (acquaintances or business associates; exchange).
    • Similarity increases willingness to help, dissimilarity decreases it.
    • Ingroup members (greater empathy).

When Do People Help? Situational Influences

  • Bystander Effect:
    • The presence of others inhibits helping.
    • The size of the group: the more people present, the less likely someone is to help.
    • Latané and Darley's step-by-step analysis of the decision-making process in emergency interventions.
    • Obstacles can interfere/disrupt helping; if a step is missed, the victim won't be helped.
    • How to effectively get help in a crowd? Enhance the chances that someone will come to aid.

Moods

  • A better mood increases helping.

Prosocial Media, Role Models, & Social Norms

  • Playing prosocial video games, interacting with prosocial robotics.
  • Seeing characters act in helpful, cooperative ways in popular media.
  • Observing helpful models increases helping in a variety of situations.
  • Standards of socially approved and disapproved behavior (reciprocity, equity, justice, fairness, social responsibility) and religious backgrounds.
  • Prosocial behavior due to peer pressure and social influence.

Aggressive & Antisocial Behaviors

  • Aggression: Behavior intended to harm another individual.
    • Comes in many forms and with varied levels.
    • Extreme acts of aggression are called violence.
    • Proactive aggression (instrumental aggression): Harm is inflicted as a means to a desired end (goal-directed, robbery).
    • Reactive aggression (hostile aggression): Harm is inflicted for its own sake, performed in response to provocation, retaliation.
    • Hard to distinguish between proactive and reactive aggression.

Gender

  • Males are consistently more aggressive than females (overtly and physically).
  • Indirect and Relational Aggression:
    • Telling lies to get someone in trouble.
    • Shutting a person out of desired activities.
    • Targeting a person's relationships and social status.
    • Threatening to end a friendship.
    • Engaging in gossip and backstabbing.

Bullying

  • Intentional harm (physical or psychological).
  • Repetition (the victim is targeted a number of times).
  • A power imbalance (the bully abuses his or her power over the victim).
  • Cyberbullying: The internet and the use of emails, electronic chat rooms, social networking sites, and other electronic means of communication.

Developmental Cascades

  • Exposure to violence from birth to adolescence has lasting influences.
  • Pathways linking family processes and child functioning may be conceptualized as interlocking, shifting gears.
  • The shifting gears are reversible.
  • Early periods to middle periods to later periods.
  • Inform interventions conducted at the very upstream of the Life River.
  • Shape long-term life developmental trajectories.

Violence Against Intimate Partners

  • No reliable gender difference in the percentage of women and men who assault their intimate partners.
  • Women are at least as likely to aggress against male partners as men are to aggress against female partners.
  • Men are far less likely than women to report physical assault by partners.
  • Consequences of aggression and violence are far from equal (severe partner assaults, men strike more often and harder).
  • Sexual assault differs greatly by gender (males being overwhelmingly more likely to be perpetrators and females to be targets).
  • Sexual assault and harassment in university settings.

Individual Differences (Personality) and Aggression

  • Low in agreeableness.
  • High on neuroticism.
  • High on impulsivity.
  • Low self-control.
  • High on emotional susceptibility.
  • Under conditions of provocation:
    • High in narcissism (an inflated sense of self-worth and self-love).
    • Low empathy for others, focus on self, sensitive to perceived insults.
  • Individuals scoring high in neuroticism:
    • Highly reactive to stress, less able to control impulses, cope poorly with stress.
    • Focus on the negative side of others and the world, have a less favorable view of self and other people.
    • Interpret interpersonal experiences pessimistically.
    • Be hostile and angry when interacting with others.

Dark Triad of Personality

  • Narcissism.
  • Machiavellianism.
  • Psychopathy.
    • The psychopathy, an impulsive thrill seeker.
    • The narcissist is a grandiose attention seeker.
    • The Machiavellian, a strategic manipulator.

Origins of Aggression

  • Nature vs. Nurture.
  • Nature: Aggression is an innate characteristic of human beings.
  • Nurture: Aggression is learned through experience.

The ‘Nature’ Side: Evolutionary Psychological Accounts

  • Human warfare originated to obtain valuable resources and attract mates.
  • Individuals who could fight had greater chances for reproductive success, passing down aggressive tendencies.
  • Aggression can lead to status in the group; higher status leads to sex and higher-quality offspring.

The ‘Nature’ Side: Biological Factors

  • Twin and adoptee studies support the heritability of human aggressive behavior (the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene).
  • Association between male sex hormones (testosterone) and aggression (males > females).
  • The role of the neurotransmitter serotonin:
    • A braking mechanism to restrain impulsive, reactive acts of aggression.
    • Low serotonin levels associated with high levels of aggression.
  • The frontal lobe of the brain:
    • Executive functioning (cognitive abilities and processes that allow humans to plan or inhibit actions).
    • Abnormalities in frontal lobe structures with tendencies toward aggressive and violent behavior.

The ‘Nurture’ Side: Social Experience

  • Positive reinforcement: Aggression produces desired outcomes.
  • Negative reinforcement: Aggression prevents or stops undesirable outcomes.
  • Children who see aggression producing more positive outcomes and fewer negative outcomes are more aggressive than other children.

Albert Bandura’s (1977) Social Learning Theory

  • Behavior is learned through the observation of others and through the direct experience of rewards and punishments.
  • Concept of vicarious or observational learning.
  • We can learn by observing, reading, or hearing about other people's actions.
  • Modeling; consequences of the behavior (reward and punishment).

Social-Cognitive Theory (Albert Bandura)

  • Cognitive Processes underlying observational learning:
    • Attentional processes.
    • Retention processes.
    • Production processes.
    • Incentive and motivational processes.
  • Distinction between learning and performance.
  • Behaviors learned through observation are not necessarily performed.
  • Performance depends on expectations about the consequences.

Gene × Environment Interaction

  • The origins of human aggression represent an interaction of evolved mechanisms and environmental and social factors.
  • The monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene (plasticity gene, individual differences in allele).
    • Peer aggressive modeling → child aggression.

Nicki R. Crick and Kenneth A. Dodge: Social Information-Processing (SIP) Model

  • Children focus on and encode particular cues in the situation.
  • Construct an interpretation of the situation (e.g., an inference about the intent of a peer).
  • Access possible responses to the situation from long-term memory, evaluate those responses.
  • Select the most favorable one for enactment.
  • Children come to a social situation with biologically limited capabilities and memories of past experiences.
  • Behavioral response is a function of cognitively processing those cues.
  • (others intents; especially in ambiguous situations); Emotion Regulation Deficits.

Readiness to Aggress

  • Traits (trait aggressiveness, dark triad traits, low empathy).
  • History (aggressive role models, see aggression rewarded, lots of media violence).
  • Aggressive cues (weapons, models).
  • Affect, arousal, cognition (negative affect, high arousal, hostile attributions).
  • Rumination.
  • Triggers (provocation, social rejection).
  • How well can we control impulsivity effectively?
  • Aggression depending on inhibition (good executive functioning, prefrontal cortical control, practiced self-control) and cognitive resources.

Self-Control: Rumination and Alcohol

  • Rumination involves repeatedly thinking about an anger-inducing event.
  • Alcohol impairs executive functioning and narrows people's focus of attention.

Media Effects

  • Violent TV viewing as a child and aggression 15 years later.
  • Playing violent and prosocial video games: links with thoughts, feelings, and actions increasing aggression.
  • Desensitization to violence refers to a reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence.
  • Desensitization is one form of habituation; reactions diminish when we get used to something.
  • Cultivation refers to the capacity of the mass media to construct a social reality that people perceive as true, even if it is not.
  • The media tend to depict the world as much more violent than it actually is.
  • This can make people become more fearful, more distrustful, more likely to arm themselves, and more likely to behave aggressively in what they perceive as a threatening situation.

How to Prevent and Reduce Violence?

  • Early parenting/socialization.
  • What can be done at a broader level? (e.g., guns control in society, media regulation).
  • Recognize complexity and work on multiple levels (family, peer group, school, neighborhood, law, society culture).
  • Self-regulation.
  • Behavioral and emotional SIP.