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.

Taking Personal Responsibility

• 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.

Weighing the Costs and Benefits

• 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.

Deciding How to Help and Taking Action

• 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.

Attribution Theory: Helping Those Who Deserve Help

• 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.

The Helper: Who Is Most Likely to Help?

• Researchers investigate moods, emotions, and personality characteristics.

Mood and Helping

• 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.

Motives for Helping: Empathy and Personal Distress

• 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.

Personality Characteristics

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

Good Samaritans

• Often strong, aggressive, principled, and trained to cope with emergencies.

Blood Donors

• Regular donors often had positive models.
• Develop internal motivation and overcome fear.
• View giving blood as part of their personal identity.

Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe

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

Gender and Helping

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

Bystander Intervention: Helping Strangers in Need

• 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.