When do People Help?

• To answer the question regarding wen people help, researchers have focused on:

  • How bystanders come to define emergencies

  • When they decide to take responsibility for helping

  • How the costs and benefits of intervening affect their decisions of whether to help

Defining the Situation: The Role of Pluralistic Ignorance

• To define ambiguous situations (including many emergencies), potential helpers may look to the action of others to decide what should be done. But those others are looking around too, also trying to figure out what to do

• Pluralistic Ignorance

  • Relying on others to define the situation and to then erroneously conclude that no intervention is necessary when help is actually needed

  • When people use the inaction of others to define their own course of action, the resulting pluralistic ignorance leads to less help being given

Do I Have to be the One to Help?: Diffusion of Responsibility

• Diffusion of Responsibility

  • Knowing that someone could help seems to relieve bystanders of personal responsibility, so bystanders do not intervene

The Costs and Rewards of Helping

• Cost-Benefit Analysis

  • If the needed help is of relatively low cost in terms of time, money, resources, or risk, then help is more likely to be given

  • The potential rewards of helping someone will also enter into the equation, perhaps offsetting the cost of helping

  • If helpful acts are recognized by others, helpers may receive social rewards of praise or monetary rewards

  • Potential helpers consider how much helping will cost and compare those costs to the rewards that might be realized; it is the economies of helping

  • If costs outweigh the rewards, helping is less likely. If rewards are greater than cost, helping is more likely

Who Helps?

• It seems there are personality and individual differences in the helpfulness of others

• Researchers have examined:

  • Role that sex and gender play in helping

  • What personality traits are associated with helping

  • The characteristics of the “prosocial personality”

Who are More Helpful – Men or Women?

• Depends on the type of help needed

• The general level of helpfulness may be pretty much equivalent between the sexes, but men and women help in different ways

• 2 factors to help explain sex and gender differences in helping

  • Related to the cost-benefit analysis process

    • Physical differences between men and women may come into play; the fact that men tend to have a greater upper body strength than women makes the cost of intervening in some situations less for a man

    • A bigger, stronger bystander is less likely to be injured and more likely to be successful

  • Simple socialization

    • Men and women have traditionally been raised to play different social roles that prepare them to respond differently to the needs of others, and people tend to help in ways that are most consistent with their gender roles

    • Female gender roles: compassionate, caring, and nurturing

    • Male gender roles: take physical risks, be heroic and chivalrous, be protective of those less powerful

    • Men may be more likely to jump onto subway tracks to save a fallen passenger, but women are more likely to give comfort to a friend with personal problems

A Trait for Being Helpful: Agreeableness

• Agreeableness

  • A core trait that includes such dispositional characteristics as being sympathetic, generous, forgiving, and helpful, and behavioral tendencies toward harmonious social relations and likability

  • Positive relationship between agreeableness and helping may be expected, those higher on the agreeableness dimension are, in fact, more likely than those low on agreeableness to help siblings, friends, strangers, or members of some other group

  • Agreeable people seem to expect that others will be similarly cooperative and generous in interpersonal relations, and they, therefore, act in helpful ways that are likely to elicit positive social interactions

Searching for Prosocial Personality

• Prosocial Personality Orientation

  • 2 major characteristics relate to the prosocial personality and prosocial behavior

  • Other-Oriented Empathy

    • People high on this dimension have a strong sense of social responsibility, empathize with and feel emotionally tied to those in need, understand the problems the victim is experiencing, and have a heightened sense of moral obligation to be helpful

    • Highly correlated with the trait of agreeableness

  • Helpfulness

    • More behaviorally oriented

    • Those high on the helpfulness factor have been helpful in the past, and because they believe they can be effective with the help they give, they are more likely to be helpful in the future

Why Help?

• Psychologists have suggested that

  • Evolutionary forces may serve to predispose humans to help others

  • Egoistic concerns may determine if and when help will be given

  • Selfless, altruistic motives may also promote helping in some cases

Evolutionary Roots for Prosocial Behavior

• Our very survival was no doubt promoted by the prosocial relations with clan and family member, and, as hereditary consequence, we may now be especially likely to help those closest to s – blood-related relatives with whom we share a genetic heritage

• We are helpful in ways that increase the chances that our DNA will be passed along to future generations – the goal of “selfish gene”

• Kin Selection: the favoritism shown for helping our blood relatives

• Reciprocal Altruism

  • We are all better off in the long run if we help one another

  • If we help someone now increases the chances that you will be helped later, then your overall chances of survival are increased

  • Cheaters will not enjoy the benefit of help from others, reducing the likelihood of the survival of themselves and their kin

Egoistic Motivation for Helping

• Negative State Relief Model

  • Suggests that people sometimes help in order to make themselves feel better

  • Whenever we are feeling sad, we can use helping someone else as a positive mood boost to feel happier

  • Through socialization, we have learned that helping can serve as a secondary reinforcement that will relieve negative moods

• Arousal: Cost-Reward Model

  • Provides an additional way to understand why people help

  • Focus on the aversive feelings aroused by seeing another in need

  • By eliminating the victim’s pain, we eliminate our own aversive arousal

  • Helping is an effective way to alleviate our own discomfort

  • Explicitly includes the cost or reward considerations that come into play

  • Potential helpers will find ways to cope with the aversive arousal that will minimize their costs – maybe by means other than direct involvement

  • If the costs of helping are too high, bystanders may reinterpret the situation to justify not helping at all. For some, fleeing the situation causing their distress may do the trick

• See the primary motivation for helping as being the helper’s own outcome

• Victim’s outcome is of relatively little concern to the helper – benefits to the victim are incidental byproducts of the exchange

• The victims may be helped, but the helper’s real motivation according to these 2 explanations is egoistic: Helpers help to the extent that it makes them feel better

Altruistic Help

• Altruism

  • Helping that has as its ultimate goal the improvement of another’s welfare

  • May also be a motivation for helping under the right circumstances

• Empathy-Altruism Model

  • Explain altruistically motivated helping for which the helper expects no benefits

  • The key for altruism is empathizing with the victim, that is, putting oneself on the shoes of the victim and imagining how the victim must feel

  • When taking this perspective and having empathetic concern, potential helpers become primarily interested in increasing the well-being of the victim, even if the helper must incur some costs that might otherwise be easily avoided

  • Does not dismiss egoistic motivations; helpers not empathizing with a victim may experience personal distress and have an egoistic motivation, not unlike the feelings and motivations explained by the arousal: cost-reward model

  • Altruistically motivated helpers are willing to accept the cost of helping to benefit a person with whom they have empathized – this “self-sacrificial” approach to helping is the hallmark of altruism