Chapter 10 Helping others part 2

The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

According to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, taking the perspective of a person in need creates feelings of empathic concern, which produce the altruistic motive to reduce the other person's distress. When people do not take the other's perspective, they experience feelings of personal distress, which produce the egoistic motive to reduce their own discomfort.

(Abbate & Ruggieri, 2011; Batson et al., 1983).

Another limit is created by the fact that motives do not guarantee behaviour. Empathy leads to altruistic motivations, but not necessarily to helpful behaviours. For example, someone with empathic concern for another might not help this person if he or she fears that the potential cost of offering the help is too high under the circumstances.

Audience inhibition

I'll look like a fool

Self-concerns

I'm late for a very important date!

Lack of competence

I'm not trained to handle this, and who would I call?

Ambiguity

Is she really sick or just drunk Relationship between attacker and victim They'll have to resolve their own family quarrels.

Pluralistic ignorance

No one else seems worried

(Davis et al., 2004; de Waal, 2009; Eisenberg, 2010).

The major cognitive component of empathy is perspective taking: using the power of imagination to try to see the world through someone else's eyes.

Batson's model of altruism is based on his view of th

consequences of empathy, which has long been viewed as a basic factor in promoting positive behaviour toward others

if you perceive someone in need and focus on your own feelings or on how you would feel in that person's situation, you are not adopting the perspective of the needy person; rather, you will experience self-oriented feelings of personal distress

empathy-altruism hypothesis

Brent Simpson and Robb Willer (2008)

is also the case that some individuals may tend to be more or less altruistic than others. For example, in a set of studies, Brent Simpson and found that individuals they classified as egoists tended to act prosocially when their reputations were at stake, but individuals they classified as altruists tended to act prosocially regardless of whether their reputations could be affected.

Batson (2009; Batson et al., 2011)

perspective taking is the first step toward altruism. If you perceive someone in need and imagine how that person feels, you are likely to experience other-oriented feelings of empathic concern, which in turn produce the altruistic motive to reduce the other person's distress.

Warneken and Michael Tomasello (2006)

placed 18-month-old human infants with an adult experimenter. At various points in time, the experimenter appeared to have trouble reaching a goal. For example, he accidentally dropped a marker on the floor and tried unsuccessfully to reach it, or he couldn't put some magazines into a cabinet because the doors were closed. Twenty-two of the twenty-four infants tested in the study helped the experimenter in at least one of the tasks, and many infants helped on several tasks.

empathic concern

which involves other-oriented feelings, such as sympathy, compassion, and tenderness. In contrast to empathic concern is personal distress, which involves self-oriented reactions to a person in need, such as feeling alarmed, troubled, or upset.

Diffusion of responsibility

Someone else must have called 911.

Distraction

Stop fooling around, kids, we're here to eat.

bystander effect

The effect whereby the presence of others inhibits helping.

Noticing

The first step toward being a helpful bystander is to notice that someone needs help or, at least, that something out of the ordinary is happening. The presence of others can be distracting and can divert attention away from indications of a victim's plight. In addition, people may fail to notice that someone needs help because they are caught up in their own self-concerns.

empathy

Understanding or vicariously experiencing another individual's perspective and feeling sympathy and compassion for that individual.

Costs exceed rewards

What if I do something wrong? He'll sue me!

Batson came up with

an elegant solution. It depends, he says, on whether one can obtain the relevant self-benefits without relieving the other's need. For example, when a person's motive is egoistic, helping should decline if it's easy for the individual to escape from the situation. Batson and others have conducted more than 30 experiments that have found support for the empathy-altruism hypothesis. For example, Batson and his colleagues (2007) demonstrated the role of both perspective taking and having warm emotional reactions to the other person in predicting helping. Students in this study read about a fictitious student named Bryan Banks who was hit by a car while running late to class and was seriously injured.

Latané and Darley

overturned this common-sense assumption and provided a careful, step-by-step analysis of the decision-making process involved in emergency interventions. In the following sections, we examine each of five steps in this process: noticing something unusual, interpreting it as an emergency, taking responsibility for getting help, deciding how to help, and providing assistance. We also consider the reasons why people sometimes fail to take one of these steps and, therefore, do not help.