Social Psychology - Ch 10: Helping Others

When Feeling Good Might Not Lead to Doing Good

-Costs of helping are high -> puts good mood at risk -Positive thoughts about other social activities that conflict with helping

Why are people more likely to help in a good mood?

-Desire to maintain one's good mood - helping others makes us feel good and maintain a good mood -Positive thoughts and expectations - positive moods trigger positive thoughts, and if we have positive thoughts about others, we should like them more and should have positive expectations about interacting with others -> leading to helping behaviors

Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis (Batson 2009a:2011)

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.

Prosocial behaviors

Actions intended to benefit others

Results of Darley and Batson (1973)

Ahead of time -> 63% offered help On time -> 45% offered help Late - > 10% offered help -The irony was that several students giving a talk on the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way.

Norms based on fairness

Examples: -The **norm of reciprocity** establishes a strong, socially approved standard: People who give to you should be paid back. -The **norm of equity**, which prescribes that when people are in a situation in which they feel overbenefited, they should help those who are underbenefited.

Deciding How to Help and Providing Help

If a person has assumed the responsibility to help, he or she must still pass through these final two steps before taking action. Obstacles here include: -Feeling a lack of competence in knowing how to help -Worrying that the potential costs of helping may be too great to justify taking the risk. -Presence of others can be an obstacle here as well, since people sometimes feel to socially awkward or embarrassed to act helpfully in a public setting. (audience inhibition) -However, when worrying about others involves worrying that they will scorn you for failing to help, the presence of an audience increases their helpful actions.

Perspective taking

Major cognitive component of empathy - using the power of imagination to try to see the world through someone else's eyes.

Prosocial Media Effects

Media can have prosocial effects on attitudes and behaviors!

altruistic

Motivated by the desire to improve another's welfare.

Kin selection

Preferential helping of genetic relatives, which results in the greater likelihood that genes held in common will survive

Marlone Henderson et al. (2012) - Modeling Helping of Distant Others

Students at UT read about students from Beijing who dedicated time to helping disadvantaged children. The children were psychologically and physically close (children in Beijing) or far (children in Turkey) from the helpers. Texas students were subsequently given the chance to purchase a shirt to raise money for these children or to donate money to help victims of the destructive impact of a tornado in a midwestern city in the U.S. In both cases, the Texas students were significantly more charitable after reading about a model of more distant rather than closer helping by the Beijing students.

Empathy

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

Taking Responsibility

When help is needed, who is responsible for providing it? If a person knows that others are around, it is all too easy to place the responsibility on *them*. People often fail to help because of the diffusion of responsibility.

"Duty to rescue" laws

A different kind of Good Samaritan laws which increase the cost of FAILING to help. These laws require people to provide or summon aid in an emergency so long as they do not endanger themselves in the process. In the US, this kind of duty to rescue law is relatively rare, but they are more common in Europe and Canada.

Feeling good

A growing body of research reveals a strong relationship between giving help and feeling better, including improvements in mental and physical health.

Oxytocin

A hormone implicated in empathy and prosocial behaviors. Involved in mother-infant attachment as well as in bonding between mating pairs. Humans given a boost of oxytocin (through a nasal spray) in experiments behaved in more cooperative and trusting ways than did participants given a placebo.

Empathic concern

A key emotional component of empathy - which involves other-oriented feelings, such as sympathy, compassion, and tenderness

Bystander Effect Online

Abuse online, such as in the form of bullying via a social network site, or cries for attention and help from suicidal individuals may be met with the same kind of bystander inaction that we have seen in these real-world cases, and the diffusion of responsibility can be all the greater because of the additional physical and psychological distance the online world creates.

Attractiveness & Receiving Help

Attractive people are more likely to be offered help and cooperation across a number of different settings. In addition to physical attractiveness, interpersonal attractiveness is also related to receiving more help.

Douglas Gentile et al. (2009) - Super Mario Makes You Super Nice? Effects of Prosocial Video Games

College students played a video game in which the characters acted in either helpful, cooperative ways (prosocial games), violent ways (violent game), or neither (neutral game). They later had the opportunity to either help a partner's chances of earning money in a puzzle-solving task by assigning them easy puzzles or to hurt his or her chances by assigning difficult puzzles. Students were significantly more likely to help the partner by assigning an easier set of puzzles if they had played a prosocial game than if they had played a neutral or violent video game.

"bystander calculus"

Determines what bystanders will do in an emergency - it is their computation of the costs and rewards associated with helping. When potential rewards (to self and victim) outweigh potential costs (to self and victim), bystanders will help. But the other way around, it is likely that the victims will not be helped.

Bad Moods and Doing Good

Doesn't decrease helping behaviors, surprisingly. Under many circumstances, negative feelings can elicit positive behavior toward others - even more so than with a neutral disposition.

Effective way to increase helping (Mark Synder 1993)

Encourage people to recognize and feel comfortable with the convergence of self-oriented and other-oriented concerns.

Social norms

General rules of conduct established by society. These norms embody standards of socially approved and disapproved behaviors.

egoistic

Motivated by the desire to increase one's own welfare - selfish concerns.

Marlone Henderson

Proposed that learning about individuals who engage in acts of helping others who are very psychologically and perhaps physically distant from them can capture people's attention and inspire them to act in kind.

What Is The Altruistic Personality?

Research has found that people who tend to be very agreeable, and people who are relatively humble are more likely to be helpful than people who are disagreeable or lack humility.

Bystander effect (Latané and Darley, 1968)

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. However, in many situations the problem isn't necessarily perceived. The presence of others can be distracting and can divert attention away from indications of a victim's plight. Also, people from big cities may be used to noise/screams/seeing people on the ground so that they begin to tune them out, becoming susceptible to what Milgram called "stimulus overload"

Emphatic joy

The pleasure one has at seeing another person experience relief

Negative state relief model (short def)

The proposition that people help others in order to counteract their own feelings of sadness.

Courageous resistance

Thoughtful helping in the face of potentially enormous costs. Although giving help is often associated with positive affect and health, when the help involves constant and exhausting demands, which is often the case when taking long-term care of a very ill person, the effects on helpers' physical and mental health -- as well as their financial security -- can be quite negative.

Getting Help in a Crowd: What Should You Do?

Try to counteract the ambiguity of the situation by making it very clear that you need help and try to reduce the diffusion of responsibility by singling out particular individuals for help, such as with eye contact, pointing, or direct requests.

Audience inhibition

When observers do not act in an emergency because they fear making a bad impression on other observers, they are under the influence of audience inhibition.

Two individual difference factors as predictors of helpfulness

-Empathy -> Being able to take the perspective of others and experience empathy clearly is associated positively with helping and other prosocial behaviors in children and adults. -Advanced moral reasoning - Children and adults who exhibit internalized and advanced levels of moral reasoning behave more altruistically than others. Such reasoning involves adhering to moral standards independent of external social controls and taking into account the needs of others when making decisions about courses of action.

The rewards of helping

-Feeling good -Being good

When a negative mood makes us less likely to help

-If we blame others for our bad mood ("I feel so angry at that jerk who put me in this situation.") -If we become very self focused ("I am so depressed.") -If we think about our personal values that do not promote helping ("I have to wise up and start thinking about my own needs more.")

When a negative mood makes us more likely to help

-If we take responsibility for what caused our bad mood ("I feel guilty for my actions.") -If we focus on other people ("Wow, these people have suffered so much.") -If we think about our personal values that promote helping ("I really shouldn't act like such a jerk next time; I have to be nicer.")

Gender and Helping

-Men help strangers in potentially dangerous situations more than women do -Women help friends and relations with their "social support" more than men do. -***The evidence for gender differences is not strong for acts of helping that do not easily fit ether of these categories -Compared with women, men are more hesitant to seek help, especially for relatively minor problems. -> less socially acceptable and more threatening to their self-esteem.

Good Moods and Doing Good

-People are much more likely to help someone when they are in a good mood.

Research on the relationship helping and interpersonal connection

-People are prone to help their kin, ingroup members, and people with whom they have a close or reciprocal relationship. -Two kinds of connections lie at the heart of the empathy-altruism hypothesis: the cognitive connection of perspective taking and the emotional connection of empathic concern. -In an emergency, bystanders who know the victim or know each other are more likely to intervene. -People who respond emphatically to another's suffering and consider the plight of others in their own moral reasoning are more likely to help than are others. -Perceived similarity increases helping.

Diffusion of responsibility

-The belief that others will or should intervene. -Diffusion of responsibility ***cannot*** occur only if an individual believes that only he or she is aware of the victim's need. -A set of experiments also indicates that the presence of others can promote diffusion of responsibility even when those others are present only in one's mind. -Results indicated that participants who had just thought of being with many other people were less likely to help than were participants who imagined themselves alone. -Usually takes place under conditions of anonymity. Bystanders who do not know the victim personally are more likely to see others as responsible for providing help. -Additionally, the diffusion of responsibility can be defeated by a person's role. A group leader, even if he or she has only recently been assigned to that position, is more likely than other group members to act in an emergency. -Occupational roles also increase the likelihood of intervention. Registered Nurses, for example, do not diffuse responsibility when confronted by a possible physical injury.

Limits to the empathy-altruism hypothesis

-There are multiple motives for helping, and many (probably most) helpful acts are best explained in other terms. -Additionally, any single helpful action can be the result of a mixture of egoistic and altruistic motives. -Also, motives do not guarantee behavior.

Meta-analyses on the bystander effect

1) Latané and Nida (1981) concluded that the bystander effect has a firm empirical foundation and has withstood the tests of time and replication. 2) Peter Fischer et al. (2011) concluded the same as above, but also found that the bystander effect is weaker in dangerous than non-dangerous situations. Three reasons for this: -Dangerous situations are more likely to be clearly interpreted to be emergencies where someone needs help -The presence of other bystanders offers physical support, which is more necessary for dangerous situations -Some dangerous situations can only be resolved through coordination among several bystanders

Two sets of social norms that bear directly on when people are likely to help

1) Norms based on fairness. 2) Norms based on a larger sense of what is right.

The Five Steps to Helping in an Emergency

1) Noticing something unusual 2) Interpreting it as an emergency 3) Taking responsibility for getting help 4) Deciding how to help 5) Providing help

Why do people who exemplify helping inspire us to help?

1) They provide an example of behavior for us to imitate directly. 2) When they are rewarded for their helpful behavior, people who model helping behavior teach us that helping is valued and rewarding, which strengthens our own inclination to be helpful. 3) The behavior of these models makes us think about and become more aware of the standards of conduct in our society.

Darley and Batson (1973)

Examined the role of time pressure in an experiment that produced a super ironic finding - their study was based on the parable of the Good Samaritan. -They asked seminary students to prepare to give a talk. Half of them were told that the talk was to be based on the parable of the Good Samaritan; the other half expected to discuss jobs that seminary students like best. -All participants were then instructed to walk over to a nearby building where the speech would be recorded. At this point, participants were told that they were ahead of schedule, on time, or that they were a bit behind schedule -On the way, all participants passed a research confederate, who obviously needed help. Surprisingly, the topic of the talk had little effect on helping. Conversely, the presence of time made a big difference.

Norms based on a larger sense of what is right

Examples: -The **norm of social responsibility**, which dictates that people should help those who need assistance. -Concerns about justice or fairness, in which people's intentions to help someone will be driven more by their belief that this person deserves their assistance than by their belief that he or she simply needs it. -Norms based on religion, which are important to many people and can influence attitudes and behavior about helping. In a study conducted in which students in Thailand self-reported altruistic behaviors, they often cited norms and values based on religion to explain why they (the people, that is) would help in various situations.

Role Models and Social Norms

Findings about the relation between prosocial television and children's real prosocial behavior demonstrates that power of role models. Observing helpful models increases helping in a variety of situations.

Fitzgerald et al. 2010

Fitzgerald et al. found that under low risk scenarios participants were more likely to help romantic partners than siblings, and they were as willing to help romantic partners with whom they had no biological children as they were to help those with whom they did. Under high-risk situations, however, participants became more likely to help siblings and romantic partners with whom they had biological children, but less willing to help romantic partners with whom they had no children or had adopted children. *** In other words, under high risk scenarios, genetic relatedness became more important in decisions about helping. ***

Michelle Lobchuk et al. (2008) - study on attributions of responsibility & receiving help

Found that caregivers of people with lung cancer had more negative emotions and gave less supportive help if they believed that the patient was largely responsible for his or her disease.

Location and Helping

In general, people are less likely to help strangers in urban areas than in rural ones. Levine et al. (2008) found (***IN THE UNITED STATES) that the biggest cities tend to have the worst scores for helping - overall, greater population size and population density were associated with less helping. -Also found that better economy = more helping

How to tell the difference between egoistic and altruistic motives in actual events?

It depends on whether one can obtain the relevant self-benefits without believing 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 and therefore escape his or her own feelings of distress. When a person's motive is altruistic, however, help will be given regardless of the ease of escape.

"Good Samaritan" Laws

Laws that encourage bystanders to intervene in emergencies by offering them legal protection, particularly doctors who volunteer medical care when they happen upon emergencies.

Culture and Helping

Levine et al. (2001) found that globally, better economy in a country was associated with less helping in its cities. Also associated with helping was the concept of "simpatia" or "simpatico" - an important element of Spanish and Latin American cultures and involves a concern with the social well-being of others. The five cultures in this study that valued this did tend to show higher rates of helping than those that did not. ***Collectivism was not a predictor of helping The authors propose that when helping involves more abstract types of giving -- as opposed to helping someone from within one's ingroup -- individualism may be associated with greater helping.

Interpreting

Noticing is the first step, but then people must interpret the meaning of what they notice. Cries of pain can be mistaken for shrieks of laughter; a heart-attack victim can appear to be a sleeping drunk. So observers wonder: does that person really need help? In general, the more ambiguous the situation is, the less likely it is that bystanders will intervene.

Frans de Waal (2003)

Observed a group of chimpanzees engaged in ~7,000 interactions and recorded their grooming and food sharing behaviors. He noted striking evidence of reciprocal altruism among these chimps - moreover, this reciprocity was observed across acts (i.e. grooming, food sharing).

Time pressure

One of the obstacles to helping in an emergency. When we are in a hurry or have a lot on our minds, we may be so preoccupied that we fail to notice others who need help, become less likely to accept responsibility for helping someone, or decide that costs of helping are too high because of the precious time that will be lost.

Elaine Madsen et al. (2007)

Participants asked to hold difficult leg positions. Longer time held = more money. Consistent with the predictions based on kin selection, participants withstood the pain and held the position longer if they were doing so for a genetically close relative than for a more distant relative, friend, or charity.

Fitzgerald et al. 2009 - Helping Kin When Risks Are High

Participants indicated how willing they would be to offer different types of help to a friend, a half-sibling, or a sibling. The help was either low risk, medium risk, or high risk. For the lowest risk help, participants were as willing to help a friend as they were to help a sibling. For higher-risk helping, in contrast, participant were more willing to help a sibling than a friend, with willingness to help a half-sibling coming in the middle.

Attributions of responsibility & receiving help

People are more likely to help someone in need if they think the person shouldn't be held responsible for his or her predicament. If they think (even unjustifiably) that the person can be blamed for his or her situation, they are less likely to help. These effects can be seen from mundane (lending notes) to extreme situations (such as interfering in an instance of domestic violence).

Convergence of Motives : Volunteering

People tend to engage in more long-term helping behavior, such as volunteerism, due to multiple motives. Synder and Omoto (2008) observed that purely altruistic motives may not keep individuals motivated long enough to withstand the personal costs associated with some kinds of prolonged helping. Both motives converging consistently predict helping behaviors/volunteerism.

Negative state relief model

Proposes that because of this positive effect of helping, people who are feeling bad may be inclined to help others in order to improve their mood. Indeed, after experiencing a traumatic event, some individuals seek out opportunities to help others in order to feel better about themselves instead of becoming bitter and antisocial. Helping others may help heal oneself.

Is helpfulness inherited?

Recent research suggests that differences in helpfulness appears to be partly based on genetics. Identical twins are more similar to each other in their helpful behavioral tendencies and their helping-related emotions and reactions than fraternal twins. These findings suggest that there may be a heritable component to helpfulness.

Pluralistic ignorance

Startled by a sudden, unexpected, possibly dangerous event, each person looks quickly to see what others are doing. As everyone looks at everyone else for clues about how to behave, the entire group is paralyzed by indecision. The state in which people in a group mistakenly think that their own individual thoughts, feelings, or behaviors are different from those of the others in the group, when in fact many of the other people are thinking or feeling the same way -- each bystander thinks that other people aren't acting because somehow they know there isn't an emergency.

Are some people more helpful than others?

Researchers have found some evidence that people who are more helpful than others in one situation are likely to be more helpful in other situations as well. Longitudinal research suggests that this individual differences may be relatively stable over time. One study found that the degree to which preschool children exhibited spontaneous helping behavior predicted how helpful they would be in later childhood and early adulthood.

Stocks et al. (2009) - Empathy and Helping: Not Taking the Easy Way Out

Students were induced to experience low or high empathy toward a suffering student named Katie. They were led to believe that they would remember or soon forget what they learned about Katie. The students were then given a chance to volunteer to help Katie. Students in the low-empathy condition tended not to offer their help i they thought they wouldn't remember Katie and her plight. Students in the high-empathy condition offered to help whether or not they thought they would forget her situation.

Arousal: cost-reward model

The proposition that people react to emergency situations by acting in the most cost-effective way to reduce the arousal of shock and alarm. Stipulates that both emotional and cognitive factors determine whether bystanders to an emergency will intervene. Emotionally, bystanders experience the shock and alarm of personal distress; this unpleasant state of arousal motivates them to do something to reduce it.

The Helping Connection

Theory and research seem to indicate that helping requires the recognition of meaningful connections among individuals.

Benson et al. (1976) - study on attractiveness and receiving help

This study was conducted in a large metropolitan airport. Darting into a phone booth to make a call, each of 604 travelers discovered some materials supposedly left behind accidentally by the previous called (planted): a packet containing a completed graduate school application form, a photograph of the person, and a stamped, addressed envelope. In some packets, the photo was attractive, in some they were relatively unattractive. When researchers checked their mail, they found that people were more likely to send in the materials of the good-looking applicants than those of the less attractive applicants.

Are some people more likely to receive help than others?

Two characteristics addressed in research: 1) Attractiveness of the person in need 2) Whether or not the person seems responsible for being in the position of needing assistance

Reciprocal altruism

What is the reproductive advantage of helping someone who isn't related to you? The most common answer is reciprocity. Through reciprocal altruism, helping someone else can be in your best interest because it increases the likelihood that you will be helped in return. If A helps B and vice versa, both A and B increase their chances of survival and reproductive success.