Chapter 13: Prosocial Behaviour

December 6, 2018 9:43 AM

The Basic Motives for Helping

○ Prosocial behavior: An action by an individual that is intended to benefit another
individual or set of individuals
○ Altruism: The desire to help another purely for the other person’s benefit,
regardless of whether we derive any benefit.
- Human Nature and Prosocial Behavior
▪ Kin selection: The idea that natural selection led to greater tendencies to
help close kin than to help those with whom we have little genetic relation.
○ Genetic influences
▪ People may be helpful because prosocial behaviour might have been
generally adaptive in the history of our species
▪ Although the propensity for helping is especially strong among close kin, it
is not restricted to them
▪ Prosocial emotions contribute to helping
▪ Norms of reciprocity contribute to prosocial behaviour, even among
strangers
□ Norm of reciprocity: An explanation for why we give help: if I help
you today, you might be more likely to help me tomorrow.
▪ Research with twins, toddlers, and nonhuman animals points to an inherited
biological basis of prosocial behaviour
○ Learned behaviour
▪ Parents greatly influence prosocial behaviour in children
▪ Children learn prosocial behaviour in stages: to get things (such as gold
stars), for social rewards, and to satisfy internal moral values
▪ Media can encourage prosocial behaviour by making helping-related thought
more accessible

Does Altruism Exist?

- Social Exchange Theory: Helping to Benefit the Self
○ Social exchange theory: An approach that maintains that people provide help to
someone else when the benefits of helping and the costs of not helping outweigh
the potential costs of helping and the benefits of not helping.
○ People do a quick cost-benefit analysis to determine whether or not to help
someone
- Empathy: Helping to Benefit Others
○ Empathy-altruism model: The idea that the reason people help others depends on
how much they empathize with them. When empathy is low, people help others
when benefits outweigh costs; but when empathy is high, people help others even
at costs to themselves.
○ Example: When your next-door neighbor is stressed out over moving, you might
pitch in and pack a few boxes because you have the afternoon free and you know
you would feel guilty if you didn’t. But you might not skip your favorite class or
switch a shift at work to load her things onto a moving van unless you feel a true
sense of empathy for her situation
○ People can feel empathy, and this leads to genuinely altruistic acts
- Negative State Relief Hypothesis: Helping to Reduce Our Own Distress
○ Negative state relief hypothesis: The idea that people help in order to reduce their
own distress.
○ Helping triggered by empathy is still egotistic because it reduces one's own pain.
However, meta-analysis finds little evidence that negative state relief is the real
motivation for helping those with whom we empathize
- Okay, Altruism: Yes or No
○ Empathy increases helping, even when people can expect that some other good
event will boost their mood

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 ○
event will boost their mood
○ People are most likely to help the person specifically with the problem they are
confronting; people are not motivated to provide help that would be irrelevant
○ People can be sensitive to another’s needs and work to alleviate another person’s
pain rather than merely to reduce their own sadness or guilt
○ Recent neuroscience evidence suggests that there are qualitatively distinct neural
responses to imagining what someone else is feeling when he or she is in pain and
imagining your own experience of pain if you were in another person’s place

The social and Emotional Triggers of Helping

- Similarity and Prejudice
○ People are most likely to help those who are similar to them
▪ Walk past those who are dissimilar or against whom they are prejudiced
○ This can lead to prejudicial behaviour when people ignore the plight of those who
are different
- The Empathy Gap
○ Empathy gap: The underestimation of other people’s experience of physical pain
as well as the pain of social rejection
○ People tend to underestimate others' pain
○ This can result in an empathy gap and less likelihood of offering help
- The Role of Causal Attributions
○ Because of attributional processes and a desire to see the world as just, people
may convince themselves a person bears responsibility for his troubles
○ This feeling can reduce empathy and thus helping
- Other Prosocial Feelings
○ People are motivated to help by feelings of guilt, communal connections, and
others' gratitude
▪ When people do not feel personally responsible for harm done to another
person or group, they can feel guilt about that harm, a feeling labeled
collective guilt.
▪ Communal orientation: A frame of mind in which people don’t distinguish
between what’s theirs and what is someone else’s.
□ Example: Family relationships are the prototypical communal
relationship, especially the relationship between a parent and child.
▪ When the people we help express their gratitude, we are more likely to help
again, not just the person who thanked us but anyone else in need
○ A clear sense of one's own rational security can also facilitate helping

Priming Prosocial Feelings and Behaviour

- Positive Affect
○ Positive moods that put people in a prosocial mindset
○ When people are in a good mood they may help in order to avoid the guilt that
would arise if they turned their backs on someone in need
○ Happy moods make people see the best in other people
- Prosocial Metaphors
○ Physical cues (e.g. clean scents) that are linked to prosocial concepts by means of
metaphor
○ Metaphor: a mental tool that people use to think about and understand an abstract
concept by using their knowledge of a different type of concept that is more
concrete and easier to comprehend
○ If people think about the abstract concept of morality in terms of a concrete state
(e.g., being at a high altitude or clean), then situations that prime that state should
change how people think about morality and thus affect their willingness to lend a
hand
- Priming Prosocial Roles
○ Finds and primes of friendship that cue a communal orientation
○ Social roles and relationships come with certain norms that tell us how to behave
○ Become more prosocial when they feel deindividuated and are primed with a

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 ○ Become more prosocial when they feel deindividuated and are primed with a
caregiving role
- Priming Mortality
○ Reminders of mortality that lead people to help someone who supports their world
view
○ Helping behaviors normally contribute to our sense of significance in the world
and of creating a legacy of positive impact into the future, even beyond our own
lives
- Priming Religious Values
○ Religion gives people a set of rules and restrictions that help regulate their
behavior. Religious teachings explain what it is to be a good and moral person and
almost invariably preach kindness and compassion
○ Priming religious values, although the relationship between dispositional
religiosity and helping is more complicated
○ Religiosity is also associated with prosocial values that predict increased support
for social welfare

Why Do People Fail to Help?

- The Bystander Effect
○ Bystander effect: A phenomenon in which a person who witnesses another in need
is less likely to help when there are other bystanders present to witness the event
○ The greater the number of witnesses to a situation requiring help, the less likely
any one of them will help
- Steps to Helping—or Not!—in an Emergency
○ Helping behaviour results form several steps in sequence
▪ Attending to and interpreting the situation as a emergency
□ Pluralistic ignorance: A situation in which individuals rely on others to
identify a norm but falsely interpret others’ beliefs and feelings,
resulting in inaction
▪ Taking responsibility for helping
□ Diffusion of responsibility: A situation in which the presence of others
prevents any one person from taking responsibility (e.g., for helping).
▪ Deciding how to help
▪ Cost-benefit analysis
○ At any step, some aspect of the situation (e.g. presence of others) can short-circuit
helping
- Population Density
○ In bigger cities, despite a dense population, people tend to be less willing to help
strangers
○ Urban overload hypothesis: The idea that city dwellers avoid being overwhelmed
by stimulation by narrowing their attention, making it more likely that they
overlook legitimate situations where help is needed.

Who is Most Likely to Help?

- An Altruistic Personality?
○ Personality traits such as moral reasoning, sense of social responsibility, and
empathy predict altruism
○ Altruistic personality: A collection of personality traits, such as empathy, that
render some people more helpful than others.
- Individual Differences in Motivations for Helping
○ People who identify themselves as being moral and helpful generally are more
prosocial
- The Role of Political Values
○ Political conservatives and liberals endorse different moral foundations, making
them more or less likely to help depending on their moral interpretation of the
situations
- The Role of Gender
○ Women are generally seen as being more prosocial, but in some situations men

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○ Women are generally seen as being more prosocial, but in some situations men
are more willing to help
○ In stressful situations, a suite of hormonal responses, including increases in
oxytocin, spur women to seek safety and comfort for both themselves and close
others, especially their offspring, and to build social networks

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