1. Why Do People Help?
Prosocial Behavior

2. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Prosocial behavior is any act performed with the goal of benefiting another person, regardless of motive.

3. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Altruism is the desire to help another person even if it involves a cost to the helper.

4. Defining Prosocial Behavior
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
From Simpson, 2004

5. Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Prosocial Behavior
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
From Simpson, 2004

6. Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Any action intended to benefit another (regardless of motive)
Giving a large tip to a waiter to impress your boss
Prosocial Behavior
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
From Simpson, 2004

7. Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Prosocial Behavior
Benefits another intentionally for no external reward
Sending $20 to a charity to make yourself feel good
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
From Simpson, 2004

8. Defining Prosocial Behavior
Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Prosocial Behavior
Benefits another intentionally for no external or internal reward
Jumping on a railroad track to help a stranger who has fallen
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
From Simpson, 2004

9. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
A basic question that people have asked is whether people are willing to help when there is nothing to gain, or if they only help when there is some benefit for them.

10. Theories of Prosocial Behavior
Evolutionary
Social exchange
Empathy-altruism

11. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
Evolutionary Psychology is the attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that evolved over time, according to the principles of natural selection.

12. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
Darwin recognized that altruistic behavior posed a problem for his theory: if an organism acts altruistically, it may decrease its own reproductive fitness.

13. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
The idea of kin selection is the idea that behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection.
[Suggests can pass on genes by helping genetic relatives have children or by helping their children survive.]

14. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
The norm of reciprocity is the expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future.
[Suggests reciprocity may increase likelihood of survival.]

15. Evaluation of Evolutionary approach
Although theorists can tell a story about evolutionary reasons for helping, we cannot know for sure whether helping has an evolutionary basis.
Retrospective explanations, no hard evidence.

16. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping
Social exchange theory argues that much of what we do stems from the desire to maximize our outcomes and minimize our costs. Like evolutionary psychology, it is a theory based on self-interest; unlike it, it does not assume that self-interest has a genetic basis.

17. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping
Helping can be rewarding because
increases the probability that someone will help us in return
relieves the personal distress of the bystander
gains us social approval and increased self-worth.

18. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping
Helping can also be costly (danger, time, money); thus it decreases when costs are high.

19. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping
Batson (1991) is the strongest proponent of the idea that people often help purely out of the goodness of their hearts.

20. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping
He argues that pure altruism is most likely to come into play when we experience empathy for the person in need; that is, we are able to experience events and emotions the way that person experiences them.

21. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior
Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping
The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that when we feel empathy for a person, we will attempt to help purely for altruistic reasons, that is, regardless of what we have to gain.

22. Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping

23. Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping
When did people agree to help Carol (who was in auto accident) w/work missed in Intro Psych? (Toi & Batson,1982)
High empathy: Imagine how Carol felt
Low Empathy: Be objective, don’t be concerned w/ how Carol felt

24. Is it altruism? Why or why not?
exercise

25. Altruistic or egoistic motives?
It is often difficult to disentangle whether people are helping for altruistic or egoistic motives.
If someone feels joy after helping, is that an egoistic motive?

26. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Individual Differences: The Altruistic Personality
Aspects of a person’s makeup that lead the person to help others in a wide variety of situations defines the altruistic personality.

27. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Individual Differences: The Altruistic Personality
Research has found that the extent to which people are helpful in one situation is NOT highly related to how prosocial they are in another situation.
*High altruism scores not a good predictor of helping
Personality is not the only determinant of whether people will help, at least across many situations.

28. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Individual Differences: The Altruistic Personality
It appears that different kinds of people are likely to help in different types of situations.

29. Gender and Helping
Women are universally perceived as kinder, more soft-hearted, and more helpful.
But over 90% of Carnegie Hero awards go to men (for saving, or attempting to save, the life of another). Why?
--Women are more likely to help those they already know.
--Men are more likely to help strangers in emergency situations.
From Simpson, 2004

30. Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior
Ex: Men > likely to help w/flat tire or in dangerous situation. (short-term, strangers)
Women > likely to help take care of a neighbor or elderly relative. (longer-term, close relationships)

31. Gender differences in receiving help
Are people more likely to help women or men? It depends.
Male helpers are more likely to help women than men.
Female helpers are equally likely to help men and women.
Women not only receive more help from men, but they also SEEK more help.

32. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior
People across cultures are more likely to help members of their in-group, the group with which an individual identifies as a member, than members of the out-group, a group with which an individual does not identity.

33. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior
People from collectivist cultures are more prone to help in-group members and less likely to help out-group members than are people from individualist cultures.

34. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
People who are in a good mood are more likely to help.

35. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Good moods can increase helping for three reasons
good moods make us interpret events in a sympathetic way
helping another prolongs the good mood
good moods increase self-attention and this in turn leads us to be more likely to behave according to our values and beliefs (and most of us value altruism).

36. Positive Mood: Feel good, do good
When researchers have induced a good mood (e.g., leaving dimes in the coin return slot of a pay phone, giving people cookies, etc.), they find that people in a good mood are more likely to help than those in a “neutral” mood.

37. Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Negative-state relief hypothesis says that people help in order to alleviate their own sadness and distress; it exemplifies a social exchange approach.

38. Negative mood and helping
Variety of studies show that, when people feel sad, they are more likely to help (e.g., donate money to a charity).

39. Presence of Sadness
Helping can be increased by events that trigger temporary sadness:
Reminiscing about unhappy experiences
Reading depressing statements
Failing at a task
Witnessing harm to another
From Simpson, 2004

40. AGE Young children are LESS likely to help when in a sad mood.
They have not yet learned that helping another can produce good feelings.
From Simpson, 2004

41. How can a sad mood and a happy mood both lead to more helping?
Different reasons
Sadness: Helping may improve temporary sadness. (But, if we blame others for our bad mood, sadness is not associated with more helping.) Complex association.
Happiness: May trigger positive thoughts about others. May prolong good mood. Straightforward, consistent association.

42. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Environments: Rural versus Urban
People in rural areas are more helpful. This effect holds over a wide variety of helping situations and in many countries.

43. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Environments: Rural versus Urban
One explanation is that people from rural settings are brought up to be more neighborly and more likely to trust strangers.

44. Situational determinants of prosocial behavior
Or, it might be that people living in cities are overwhelmed with too much stimulation; if you put them in a calmer environment, they might be just as likely to help.

45. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Field studies conducted in 36 cities in the U.S.
The more densely populated the area, the less likely people were to help.
Location (rural or urban) more important than whether person grew up in small town or large city.

46. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Number of Bystanders: The Bystander Effect
The bystander effect is the finding that the greater the number of bystanders who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help.

47. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Number of Bystanders: The Bystander Effect
Latané and Darley (1970) developed a decision tree to show how people decide whether to help in an emergency:
1. Noticing an Event: Yes No
2. Interpreting the Event as an Emergency Yes No
3. Assuming Responsibility Yes No
4. Knowing How to Help Yes No
5. Deciding to Implement the Help Yes No

48. Stage 1: Noticing the event
The Good Samaritan study

49. Stage 1: Noticing the event
Darley & Batson, TIME PRESSURE
IVs: Hurry or No Hurry
Topic of talk: Good Samaritan parable or jobs for seminary students
DV: Helping a man slumped in doorway
Results: No hurry condition: ____helped
Hurry condition: ___ helped
Topic of speech was __________to helping.

50. Kitty Genovese case
Was noticing the event a problem?

51. Stage 2: Interpreting the event as an emergency
Smoke-filled room study
video clip

52. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Number of Bystanders: The Bystander Effect
Pluralistic ignorance is the phenomenon whereby bystanders assume that nothing is wrong in an emergency because no one else looks concerned. This greatly interferes with the interpretation of the event as an emergency and therefore reduces helping.

53. Kitty Genovese
Was interpreting the event a problem in the Kitty Genovese case?

54. Stage 3: Assuming responsibility
Recall seizure study (earlier in the course)
When more people were present, participants were less likely to help (by getting the experimenter) and they took longer to help (if they did help).

55. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
Stage 3: Assuming responsibility
Diffusion of responsibility is the phenomenon whereby each bystander’s sense of responsibility to help decreases as the number of witnesses increases. This results in a reduction of helping.

56. Kitty Genovese
Was assuming responsibility a problem?

57. Stage 4: Weighing rewards and costs
People help when the rewards outweigh the costs
Potential rewards
Reciprocity
Social approval
Self-satisfaction
Reduced guilt and arousal
Potential costs
Danger/life threatening
Financially detrimental
Embarrassing
Time consuming

58. Stage 5: Deciding how to help
People cannot help if they do not know how to help.
Do you know CPR? The Heimlich maneuver? Your own blood type?
These were not an issue in the case of Kitty Genovese.

59. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Nature of the Relationship: Communal Versus Exchange Relationships
Communal relationships are those in which people’s primary concern is with the welfare of the other, whereas exchange relationships are governed by equity concerns.

60. Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior
The Nature of the Relationship: Communal Versus Exchange Relationships
Communal/exchange distinction means that generally we are more helpful towards friends (> likely to be communal) than strangers; the exception occurs when the other is beating us in a domain that is personally important and thus threatens our self-esteem. (Recall Tesser video)

61. How Can Helping Be Increased?
Prosocial role models
1--Bryan & Test (1967) L.A. drivers for more likely to offer help to a female driver with a flat tire if a quarter of a mile earlier they had witnessed someone helping another woman change a tire.

62. Increasing helping—Prosocial models
2—Byran & Test (1967) New Jersey Xmas shoppers were more likely to drop money into a Salvation Army kettle if they had just seen someone else to donate.

63. Increasing helping—prosocial models
3—Rushton & Campbell (1977) found British adults more willing to donate blood if they were approached after observing a confederate agree to donate.

64. Media can encourage helping
TV programming
NIMH study of Mr. Rogers
4 wks preschool program
Kids from less educated homes became more cooperative, helpful, likely to state their feelings during the 4 wk period than those who did not see the show.

65. Increasing helping: Disseminate research findings
Beaman et al. (1978) Students who had heard a lecture on bystander intervention were more likely to help in a staged emergency 2 wks later.
Heard lecture 43% helped
Did not hear lecture 25% helped