Social Pyschology 7- Social and Altruism

Altruism.

When an act is performed which benefits another person, but accrues no benefit, or has a negative effect for the person acting

People with an altruistic personality

are hypothesized to be more likely to administer help to other people in various situations.

Sometimes bystanders may fail to help out in an emergency

as they have a lack of knowledge or competency.

A person's personal characters,

as well as the situation, are thought to influence whether a person will act altruistically or not.

The main difference between the social exchange theory and the empathy-altruism hypothesis is that

while one argues that people help others only when benefits outweigh the costs, the other argues that people help due to a sense of empathy.

Sometimes people do not react positively to receiving help from another person as it makes them feel inadequate or dependant upon the other person.

Although someone may require help for some reason, they do not always want the help. One reason for this is that they may feel incompetent if someone else is able to do something which they cannot.

In some instances, helping others can have a negative impact and may have damaging effects on a person's self-esteem.

Care needs to be taken when offering help to avoid insulting the person in need, or making them feel worthless.

People are more likely to have a communal relationship with a friend than with a stranger.

Communal relationships tend to give long-term benefits rather than immediate short-term benefits. Furthermore, people tend to be more concerned about long- term benefits associated with helping those close to them, rather than the immediate benefits.

A person is less likely to help a friend than a stranger with a difficult task when the task is of great importance to their self-esteem. For example, lending study notes for a difficult exam.

For a task which is important to a person's self-esteem, people tend to be hurt more when someone close to them does better at the task, in comparison to when a stranger does better. Therefore, in this situation, a person is more likely to help the stranger than their friend.

People who know each other well tend to be more concerned with the long-term benefits of helping each other.

For example, a mother who is about to take a coffee break but is interrupted by a request to read to her child will tend to be more concerned with the long-term benefits which reading to the child will give her, rather than the short-term benefit of having a coffee break.

In some situations, even if a person does not feel empathy towards another person, they may still help them out if the rewards outweigh the costs.

For example, a person may not feel empathy towards a homeless person. However, they may give the homeless person some money if other people are nearby because they are rewarded with other people's praise or good thoughts towards them.

Sometimes an act which seems altruistic may actually be motivated by self-interest. Therefore, there is some benefit received by performing the act.

For example, a person that believes in karma may help another person because they believe that good things will happen to them if they do.

When a person puts themselves in the shoes of another person and is able to envision the experiences and emotions of another person, they are demonstrating empathy.

For example, if a person sees someone struggling to carry many packages, if they understand the difficulty associated with the task, they may feel empathy towards the other person.

Even when people have identified that a particular situation constitutes an emergency and feel responsible to help,they may still resist from helping as they need to weigh the cost of helping against not helping.

For example, people may not want to appear foolish, or risk administering the wrong type of help, and thus do not help out.

Making people aware of the barriers which prevent people from helping out during certain situations tends to increase the chance that someone will overcome the barriers.

For example, when people are informed of the bystander effect, in which the presence of other bystanders stop people from helping, people tend to overcome this effect and help out even when there are bystanders.

One fundamental assumption made by sociobiologists is that people with certain genes are more likely to perform certain social behaviors.

Furthermore, sociobiologists also assume that natural selection has resulted in some behaviors being chosen over others as they aid survival.

People in a good mood tend to help others more frequently. This has been coined the 'feel good, do good' effect.

Good moods can boost a person's eagerness to help for three reasons: people in good moods are more understanding of other people's bad fortune; people like to extend their good mood and helping can do this; and good moods increase self-attention, and thus people are more aware of acting altruistically.

Helping other people can be beneficial in that it relieves a person's distress at seeing someone in danger.

However, it can also be costly as it places the person in danger.

Although some people perform purely altruistic acts, some prosocial behavior is influenced by a selfish desire, such as a need to relieve one's own distress at seeing someone in need.

In these cases, the benefits outweigh the costs associated with helping.

The theory that prosocial behavior between genetic relatives is favored by natural selection is known as kin. selection.

Kin selection refers to the theory that people tend to help their relatives as it increases the likelihood of their genetic material being passed on to the next generation. It is suggested that this may be a reason people act prosocially towards their relatives.

Western men tend to perform prosocial acts which are chivalrous and heroic.

Men tend to perform prosocial acts based on these traits, such as generous prosocial acts or grand gestures.

Some people do not give assistance in an emergency as they do not interpret the situation as an emergency.

Not all emergency situations are explicitly emergencies. For example, people may not be sure whether a person slumped on the street is drunk, or is suffering from a medical condition. Therefore, an inability to interpret emergencies stops people giving assistance.

People are more likely to help their relatives when they face life threatening situations.

People tend to favor helping relatives rather than friends during life threatening situations, but not necessarily in non-life threatening situations. This suggests that kin selection is operating in humans to some extent

In some emergencies, people fail to help out as they assume nothing is wrong. This is sometimes a result of pluralistic ignorance, in which no one else present at the emergency seems concerned which causes people to assume nothing is wrong.

People tend to look toward other people for guidance in how to act during certain situations. Therefore, if they see other people not looking concerned in a particular situation, they in turn do not become concerned. However, other people may also be unsure how to act and so are also using other people's reactions as guidance. If no one reacts in a concerned manner, people continue to assume nothing is wrong even if the situation is an emergency.

People seem to keep track, not necessarily consciously, of the costs and rewards associated with social relationships.

The social exchange theory makes the assumption that people tend to try to increase their rewards and minimize their costs.

Western women tend to perform prosocial acts which involve long-term assistance and greater commitment.

There are different norms for men and women which affects which traits and behaviors each sex values more. Women tend to be caring and nurturing in their nature, and are more likely to perform prosocial acts which require commitment or long-term care.

People in rural towns are more likely to help others than people in urban areas.

There are differing viewpoints for this observation. Some people think that it may be due to a difference in values learned while growing up. That is, rural people learn more altruistic values in comparison to urban people. However, other people think it may be caused by the environment in which each group of people live-- that is, a factor of the environment either encourages or discourages altruism.

When there are a large number of people who witness an emergency, there tends to be less people who help out. This is known as the bystander effect.

There have been some emergency situations during which, despite the presence of many bystanders, little or no effort was made to help. This phenomenon has been termed the bystander effect, and it has been shown that the more bystanders involved in an emergency situation, the less people tend to help out.

The field of psychology which examines evolutionary theory and applies it to social behavior is sociobiology.

This is based around the idea that people inherit genes which promote certain social behaviors. Sociobiologists rely on genetics to explain why certain behaviors exist.

Norm of reciprocity is thought to be a genetic trait.

This is because the act of treating others the way people themselves would like to be treated is hypothesized to aid survival.

During an emergency situation, diffusion of responsibility refers to when a person's sense of responsibility to help out with the emergency decreases as the number of people present increases.

This is because they feel that they shouldn't have to risk incurring a cost by helping out if other people could do it. However, as most of the bystanders would feel this way, no one ends up taking responsibility.

When people are in a hurry, they often do not notice an event in which someone may require assistance.

This is one reason why bystanders may not help out in an emergency situation. For some reason, such as being in a hurry, they tend to be distracted from the situation and do not notice that it is an emergency situation.

According to the urban-overload hypothesis, people in cities tend to keep to themselves due to a desire to prevent being overstimulated.

This theory supports the idea that a person's environment, and not the values they learned while growing up, influences the difference between the extent to which urban and rural people partake in helpful behavior.

Men and women tend to show differences both in the types of acts they perform when helping, and who they tend to help.

Women tend to help friends, while men tend to help strangers.

Adult approval

a strong reward which encourages prosocial behavior in children.

The negative-state relief hypothesis

based on the idea that a person who feels sad or distressed helps out other people as it alleviates these bad feelings.

One way children may learn prosocial behavior is

by modeling the behavior of their parents.

When an act is performed in which the goal of the act is to benefit another person,

it is a display of prosocial behavior.

If a parent gives time towards helping their child learn to read, rather than taking a well earned break,

they are displaying behavior expected in a communal relationship.

The empathy- altruism hypothesis states that if a person feels empathy towards another person,

they will attempt to help them, even if there is nothing to be gained.