Social Psychology Helping Others

Role Models and Social Norms

!.) Observing a person modeling helpful behavior increases helping. 2.) Social norms that promote helping are based on a sense of fairness or on standards about what is right.

Moods and Helping

1.) A good mood increases helpfulness. 2.) People in a good mood may help in order to maintain their positive mood or because they have more positive thoughts and expectations about the helpful behavior, the person in need, or social activities in general. 3.) A bad mood can often increase helpfulness, for example when people feel guilty. 4.) People in a bad mood tend to be motivated to help people to improve their mood. 5.) A bad mood is less likely to increase helpfulness if the bad mood is attributed to the fault of others or if it causes the person to become very self-focused.

Perceived Characteristics of the Person in Need

1.) Attractive people are more likely to receive help than those who are less attractive. 2.) People are more willing to help when they attribute a person's need for assistance to uncontrollable causes rather than events perceived to be under the person's control.

The Bystander Effect

1.) Bystander effect in which the presence of others inhibits helping in an emergency has 5 necessary steps. Noticing, interpreting, taking responsibility, deciding how to help, and providing help. 2.) The distractions caused by the presence of other people and by our own self concerns may impair our ability to notice that someone needs help.4 3.) The presence of others can make bystanders less likely to interpret a situation as an emergency, perhaps through a pluralistic ignorance created by everyone trying to appear unconcerned. 4.) People may fail to take responsibility because they assume others will do so, diffusion of responsibility. 5.) Bystanders are less likely to offer direct aid when they do not feel competent. 6.) Even if people want to help, they may not if they feel doing so will make them appear foolish. 7.) The bystander effect even occurs in online contexts.

Evolution of Empathy

1.) Empathy involves understanding the emotional experience of another individual and experiencing emotions consistent to what the other is feeling. 2.) Recent work examines how seemingly higher-order, uniquely human constructs such as morality and empathy are involved in characteristics. 3.) Many primates exhibit empathy in both laboratory and natural settings.

Evolutionary Factors

1.) Evolutionary perspectives emphasize two ways that helping could become and innate, universal behavioral tendency: kin selection, in which individuals protect their own genes by helping close relatives, and reciprocal altruism, in which those who give also receive. 2.) Various primates have been observed to show some relatively elaborate examples of reciprocal altrusism and cooperation.

Friends and Helping

1.) In general, perceived similarity to a person in need increases willingness to help. 2.) People are more likely to help members of their ingroup. 3.) Research on race and helping has yielded inconsistent results.

Gender and Helping

1.) Men help strangers in potentially dangerous situations more than women do. Women help friends and relations with social support more than men do. The evidence for gender differences is not strong for acts of helping that do not easily fit either of these categories. 2.) Compared to women, men are more hesitant to seek help, especially for relatively minor problems.

Rewards of Helping

1.) People are much more likely to help when the potential rewards of helping seem high relative to the potential costs. 2.) Helping others often makes the helper feel good, it can relieve negative feelings such as guilt, and is associated with better health. Long term or high risk helping, however, can be costly to the health and well being of the helper. 3.) People who are feeling bad may be more inclined to help others in order to feel relief from their negative mood. 4.) Some situations call to mind norms that promote particular kinds of self-sacrificing, helpful behaviors.

Culture and Receiving Help

1.) People with collectivistic orientation may be less likely to help outgroup members or strangers than those with an individualistic orientation. 2.) Attributions of how responsible a person in need was for their situations played a stronger role in an individualists decision to help the person than it did in collectivists decisions to help. 3.) Perceptions of how much the person in need contributes to society affects collectivists decisions to help more than individualists. 4.) Asians tend to be more hesitant than Europeans to seek social support. When the do receive it they tend to find it more stressful. They may prefer social support that is more implicit than explicit.

Culture and Helping

1.) Research has found that variation in the helping rates of people in cities around the world. People in cities with relatively low levels of economic well-being were somewhat more likely to help strangers, and people from simpatia cultures were more likely to help strangers than people from non-simpatia cultures. 2.) Research about individualism-collectivism and helping has yielded mixed results. According to some analyses, collectivists may be more responsive than individualists to the immediate needs of a particular person but less helpful in more abstract situations.

Altruism or Egoism

1.) Scholars have debated whether altruistic or egoistic motives are behind behaviors. 2.) According to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, taking the perspective of a person perceived to be in need creates other-oriented emotion of empathic concern, which in turn produces the altruistic motive to reduce the other's distress. 3.) A number of studies support the empathy-altruism hypothesis, demonstrating that when people are altruistically motivated, they will even help when escaping from the helping situation is easy. 4.) Longer-term acts of helping, such as volunteerism, reflect both altruistic and egoistic motivations. Self-interested goals in this context can be a good thing because they promote a commitment to helping behavior to the extent that goals are met.

Altruistic Personality

1.) Some personality traits are associated with helpful behavioral tendencies in some situations, but no one set of traits appears to define the altruistic personality. 2.) Qualities that do predict helping behaviors are agreeableness, humility, empathy, and advanced moral reasoning.

Time Pressure

People in a hurry are less likely to notice or choose to help others in need.

Prosocial Media Effects

Playing video games featuring prosocial content, and watching prosocial television, are both associated with increased prosocial behavior.

Location and Helping

Residents of heavily populated areas are less likely to provide spontaneous informal help to strangers than are the residents of smaller or less densely populated communities.

People More Likely to Help

There may be a genetic heritable component to helpfulness.