Helping Behavior Notes

Perceiving a Need

Decision-making involves crucial steps:
- Perceiving a need.
- Taking personal responsibility.
- Weighing costs and benefits.
- Deciding how to help.
Shotland and Huston (1979) identified five emergency characteristics:
- Sudden and unexpected event.
- Clear threat of harm to a victim.
- Harm increases over time without intervention.
- Victim is helpless and needs assistance.
- Effective intervention is possible.
Interpretation of a situation affects aid offered.
- Shotland and Straw (1976) found different responses to an identical fight scene based on whether it was perceived as a lovers' quarrel or a fight between strangers.

People are less likely to help if they don't feel personally responsible.
Moriarity (1975) experiment: People who agreed to watch belongings were more likely to intervene when a theft occurred.
Maruyama, Fraser, & Miller (1982) field study:
- Children donated more candies when individually responsible.

People consider potential gains and losses before helping.
Prosocial behavior occurs if perceived profits (rewards minus costs) of helping outweigh not helping.
The greater the perceived costs, the less likely you are to help.
Not helping may lead to guilt or negative judgments.
Altruistic acts can be impulsive, motivated by emotions and values.

Involves deciding on assistance type and acting, often under stress.
Decision-making analysis:
- People may fail to help due to not noticing the problem, not feeling responsible, high costs, inability to help, or indecision.

People are more likely to help if the person's need is due to uncontrollable circumstances.
Meyer & Mulherin (1980): College students more willing to lend rent money if need arose due to illness (uncontrollable) rather than laziness (controllable).
Weiner (1980): More likely to lend lecture notes if needed due to professor's poor lecturing (uncontrollable) rather than classmate's poor note-taking (controllable).
Attributions affect emotional reactions:
- Sympathy for those with uncontrollable problems.
- Anger towards those responsible for their problems.

People are more willing to help when in a good mood.
Mood-maintenance hypothesis: Helping prolongs positive emotional state.
Limitations:
- Effects of positive moods are short-lived.
- Good mood may decrease helpfulness if assistance detracts from the person's good mood.
Negative-state relief model: People in a bad mood may help to relieve their own discomfort.

Altruism: Helping with no expectation of personal benefit.
Personal distress: Emotional reactions to others' plight (shock, horror, alarm).
Empathy: Sympathy and caring for others, sharing in their suffering.
Personal distress motivates reducing own discomfort, while empathy motivates helping the person in need.
Empathy can be increased by focusing on the feelings of the person in need and viewing them as similar to ourselves.

Specific personality traits and abilities dispose people to help in specific situations.

Motivated by social norms, empathy, and moral principles.
Capacity to respond to suffering and belief in justice enabled them to overcome fear.

Men are more likely to engage in heroic helping.
Women emphasize nurturant forms of prosocial behavior and are more likely to provide social support.

Research was sparked by the murder of Kitty Genovese.
Factors include the presence of other people, the nature of the physical environment, and the pressures of limited time.