1. Social Psychology (Pp 343-356)
6th edition
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College

2. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Chapter 11
Prosocial Behavior:
Why Do People Help?
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
—The Dalai Lama
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

3. What Kinds of Helping Are There?
McGuire’s Taxonomy of Helping (1994):
Casual Helping (ie, lending a pen or pencil)
Substantial Person Helping (ie, helping a friend move)
Emotional Helping (providing emotional support)
Emergency Helping (ie, giving assistance to a stranger after a car accident)

4. Take 5 minutes to list the ways you have helped someone in the last few months based on McGuire’s Taxonomy:
Casual Helping (ie, lending a pen or pencil)
Substantial Person Helping (ie, helping a friend move)
Emotional Helping (providing emotional support)
Emergency Helping (ie, giving assistance to a stranger after a car accident)

5. RESULTS Males (n = ) Females Totals Casual Helping
Substantial Person Helping
Emotional Helping
Emergency Helping

6. Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior: Why Do People Help?
Rick Rescorla was head of security for the Morgan Stanley brokerage firm. After the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Rescorla and the other employees in the South Tower were instructed to remain at their desks. Rescorla, who had spent years studying the security of the towers, had drilled his employees repeatedly in what to do in an emergency like this—find a partner, avoid the elevators, and evacuate the building. He invoked this plan immediately, and when the plane hit the South Tower, he was on the forty-fourth floor supervising the evacuation, yelling instructions through a bullhorn. After most of the Morgan Stanley employees made it out of the building, Rescorla decided to do a final sweep of the offices to make sure no one was left behind, and perished when the South Tower collapsed. Rescorla is credited with saving the lives of the 3,700 employees he guided to safety (Stewart, 2002).
And then there were the passengers on United flight 93. Based on phone calls made from the plane in the fateful minutes after it was hijacked, it appears that several passengers, including Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, and Thomas Burnett, all fathers of young children, stormed the cockpit and struggled with the terrorists. They could not prevent the plane from crashing, killing everyone on board, but they did prevent an even worse tragedy. The plane was headed for Washington, D.C., with the White House or the U.S. Capitol its likely target.

7. Prosocial Behavior & Altruism
Any act performed with the goal of benefiting another person.
Altruism
The desire to help another person even if it involves a cost to the helper.
Someone might act in a prosocial way out of self interest, hoping to get something in return. Altruism is helping purely out of the desire to benefit someone else, with no benefit (and often a cost) to oneself. Many of the heroes of September 11, for example, gave their lives in order to help strangers.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

8. Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
Any gene that furthers our survival and increases the probability that we will produce offspring is likely to be passed on from generation to generation.
Genes that lower our chances of survival, such as those causing life-threatening diseases, reduce the chances that we will produce offspring and thus are less likely to be passed on.
According to Charles Darwin’s (1859) theory of evolution, natural selection favors genes that promote the survival of the individual (see Chapter 10).
Evolutionary biologists like E. O. Wilson (1975) and Richard Dawkins (1976) have used these principles of evolutionary theory to explain such social behaviors as aggression and altruism.

9. Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
The attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection.
(Buss, 2005; Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 2005)
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

10. Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes
Darwin realized early on that there was a problem with evolutionary theory:
How can it explain altruism?
If people’s overriding goal is to ensure their own survival, why would they ever help others at a cost to themselves?
Genes promoting selfish behavior should be more likely to be passed on—or should they?
It would seem that over the course of human evolution, altruistic behavior would disappear, because people who acted that way would, by putting themselves at risk, produce fewer offspring than people who acted selfishly.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

11. Kin Selection
The idea that behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection.
People can increase the chances their genes will be passed along not only by having children but also by ensuring that their genetic relatives have children.
Because a person’s blood relatives share some of his or her genes, the more that person ensures their survival, the greater the chance that his or her genes will flourish in future generations.
Thus natural selection should favor altruistic acts directed toward genetic relatives.
One way that evolutionary psychologists attempt to resolve this dilemma is with the notion of kin selection (Hamilton, 1964; Meyer, 1999)

12. Kin Selection
Survey research found that people reported that they would be more likely to help genetic relatives than nonrelatives in life-and-death situations, such as a house fire.
Anecdotal evidence from real emergencies is consistent with these results.
People did not report that they would be more likely to help genetic relatives when the situation was non-life-threatening, which supports the idea that people are most likely to help in ways that ensure the survival of their own genes. Interestingly, both males and females, and both American and Japanese participants, followed this rule of kin selection in life-threatening situations (Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994).
Survivors of a fire at a vacation complex reported that when they became aware there was a fire, they were much more likely to search for family members before exiting the building than they were to search for friends (Sime, 1983).
Evolutionary psychologists are not suggesting that people consciously weigh the biological importance of their behavior before deciding whether to help: We don’t compute the likelihood that our genes will be passed on before deciding whether to help someone push his or her car out of a ditch. According to evolutionary theory, however, the genes of people who follow this “biological importance” rule are more likely to survive than the genes of people who do not. Over the millennia, kin selection may have become ingrained in human behavior.

13. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
The Reciprocity Norm
Norm of Reciprocity
The expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future.
Those most likely to survive, the argument goes, were people who developed an understanding with their neighbors about reciprocity: “I will help you now, with the agreement that when I need help, you will return the favor.” Because of its survival value, such a norm of reciprocity may have become genetically based (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Shackelford & Buss, 1996; Trivers, 1971).
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

14. Learning Social Norms
Nobel laureate Herbert Simon (1990) argued that it is highly adaptive for individuals to learn social norms from other members of a society.
The best learners of a society’s norms and customs have a survival advantage, because a culture learns things like which foods are poisonous and how best to cooperate.
The person who learns these rules is more likely to survive than the person who does not.
Consequently, the ability to learn social norms has become part of our genetic makeup.
One norm that people learn is the value of helping others—considered a valuable norm in virtually all societies. In short, people are genetically programmed to learn social norms, and one of these norms is altruism (Hoffman, 1981; Kameda, Takezawa, & Hastie, 2003).

15. 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 rewards and minimize our costs.
Social exchange assume that people in their relationships with others try to maximize the ratio of social rewards to social costs.
(Homans, 1961; Lawler & Thye, 1999; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959)
The difference from evolutionary approaches is that social exchange theory doesn’t trace this desire back to our evolutionary roots; nor does it assume that the desire is genetically based.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

16. Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping
Helping can be rewarding in a number of ways:
The norm of reciprocity can increase the likelihood that someone will help us in return.
Helping someone is an investment in the future, the social exchange being that someday, someone will help us when we need it.
Helping can also relieve the personal distress of a bystander.
By helping others, we can also gain such rewards as social approval from others and increased feelings of self-worth.
Considerable evidence indicates that people are aroused and disturbed when they see another person suffer and that they help at least in part to relieve their own distress (Dovidio, 1984; Dovidio, Piliavin, Gaertner, Schroeder, & Clark, 1991; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1991).

17. Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping
The other side is that helping can be costly:
Physical danger
Pain
Embarrassment
Time
Basically, social exchange theory argues that true altruism, in which people help even when doing so is costly to themselves, does not exist. People help when the benefits outweigh the costs.
Helping decreases when the costs are high (Dovidio et al., 1991; Piliavin, Dovidio, Gaertner, & Clark, 1981; Piliavin, Piliavin, & Rodin, 1975).
Perhaps Abe Zelmanowitz, who stayed behind with his friend Ed Beyea in the World Trade Center, simply found the prospect of walking away and letting his friend die too distressing.

18. Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping
The ability to put oneself in the shoes of another person and to experience events and emotions (e.g., joy and sadness) the way that person experiences them.
C. Daniel Batson (1991) is the strongest proponent of the idea that people often help purely out of the goodness of their hearts. Batson acknowledges that people sometimes help others for selfish reasons, such as to relieve their own distress at seeing another person suffer. But he also argues that people’s motives are sometimes purely altruistic, in that their only goal is to help the other person, even if doing so involves some cost to themselves.
Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
The idea that when we feel empathy for a person, we will attempt to help that person purely for altruistic reasons, regardless of what we have to gain.

19. If you do not feel empathy, then, Batson says, social exchange concerns come into play. What’s in it for you? If there is something to be gained, such as obtaining approval from the man or from onlookers, you will help the man pick up his things. If you will not profit from helping, you will go on your way without stopping. Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis is summarized in Figure 11.1.

20. Each of these approaches has its supporters and critics!
3 basic motives
To sum up, we’ve identified three basic motives underlying prosocial behavior:
Helping is an instinctive reaction to promote the welfare of those genetically similar to us (evolutionary psychology).
The rewards of helping often outweigh the costs, so helping is in our self-interest (social exchange theory).
Under some conditions, powerful feelings of empathy and compassion for the victim prompt selfless giving (the empathy-altruism hypothesis).
Each of these approaches has its supporters and critics!
Each of these approaches has its supporters and critics.

21. Personal Qualities and Prosocial Behavior: Why Do Some People Help More than Others?
If basic human motives were all there was to it, then why are some people so much more helpful than others?
Clearly, we need to consider the personal qualities that distinguish the helpful person from the selfish one.

22. Individual Differences: The Altruistic Personality
The qualities that cause an individual to help others in a wide variety of situations.
Psychologists have been interested in the nature of the altruistic personality (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Sadovsky, 2006; Mikulineer & Shaver, 2005; Penner, 2002).
As we have seen throughout this book, personality alone does not determine behavior. Social psychologists argue that to understand human behavior, we need to consider the pressures of the situation as well as an individual’s personality. Predicting how helpful people will be is no exception.
(Batson, 1998; Magoo & Khanna, 1991; Piliavin & Charng, 1990)
Surprisingly, studies of both children and adults indicate that people with high scores on personality tests of altruism are not much more likely to help than those with lower scores.

23. Individual Differences: The Altruistic Personality
Individual differences in personality are not the only predictors of how helpful someone will be.
We need to consider several other critical factors as well, such as:
Situational pressures
Gender
Culture
Current mood
Psychologists have been interested in the nature of the altruistic personality (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Sadovsky, 2006; Mikulineer & Shaver, 2005; Penner, 2002).
As we have seen throughout this book, personality alone does not determine behavior. Social psychologists argue that to understand human behavior, we need to consider the pressures of the situation as well as an individual’s personality. Predicting how helpful people will be is no exception.
(Batson, 1998; Magoo & Khanna, 1991; Piliavin & Charng, 1990)

24. Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior
Consider two scenarios:
In one, someone performs a dramatic, heroic act, like storming the cockpit of United flight 93 to fight the terrorists.
In the other, someone is involved in a long-term helping relationship, such as assisting a disabled neighbor with chores around the house.
Are men or women more likely to help in each situation?

25. Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior
Scenario 1 (Males are more likely to help)
Someone performs a dramatic, heroic act, like storming the cockpit of United flight 93 to fight the terrorists.
Scenario 2 (Females are more likely to help)
Someone is involved in a long-term helping relationship, such as assisting a disabled neighbor with chores around the house.
(Eagly, 1987; Eagly & Crowley, 1986)
In virtually all cultures, norms prescribe different traits and behaviors for males and females, learned as boys and girls are growing up. In Western cultures, the male sex role includes being chivalrous and heroic; females are expected to be nurturant and caring and to value close, long-term relationships.
Of the seven thousand people who received medals from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission for risking their lives to save a stranger, 91 percent have been men.
Researchers have focused less on helping that involves more nurturance and commitment, but a few studies have found that women do help more in long-term, nurturant relationships than men do (George, Carroll, Kersnick, & Calderon, 1998; McGuire, 1994; Otten, Penner, & Waugh, 1988; Smith, Wheeler, & Diener, 1975), and women are somewhat more likely to engage in volunteer work than men (Wilson, 2000). Cross-cultural evidence suggests the same pattern. In a survey of adolescents in seven countries, more girls than boys reported doing volunteer work in their communities (Flanagan, Bowes, Jonsson, Csapo, & Sheblanova, 1998).

26. Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior
People in all cultures are more likely to help anyone they define as a member of their in-group than those they perceive in out-groups.
In-Group
The group with which an individual identifies as a member.
Does an independent view of the self versus a more interdependent, group-oriented outlook affect people’s willingness to help others? Because people with an interdependent view of the self are more likely to define themselves in terms of their social relationships and have more of a sense of “connectedness” to others, we might predict that they’d be more likely to help a person in need.
Out-Group
Any group with which an individual does not identify.

27. Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior
In many interdependent cultures, the needs of in-group members are considered more important than those of out-groups, and consequently, people in these cultures are more likely to help in-group members than members of individualistic cultures are.
However, because the line between “us” and “them” is more firmly drawn in interdependent cultures, people in these cultures are less likely to help members of out-groups than people in individualistic cultures are.
3. Thus to be helped by other people, it is important that they view you as a member of their in-group—as “one of them”—and this is especially true in interdependent cultures.
(Leung & Bond, 1984; Miller, Bersoff, & Harwood, 1990; Moghaddam, Taylor, & Wright, 1993)
(L’Armand & Pepitone, 1975; Leung & Bond, 1984; Triandis, 1994)
(Ting & Piliavin, 2000)

28. Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior
A particular cultural value that strongly relates to prosocial behavior is simpatía.
Prominent in Spanish-speaking countries, simpatía refers to a range of social and emotional traits, including being:
Friendly
Polite
Good-natured
Pleasant and
Helpful toward others
Interestingly, simpatía has no direct English translation.
Levine and colleagues (Levine, 2003; Levine, Norenzayan, & Philbrick, 2001) found that people in countries that value simpatía helped a blind man on the street more than in countries that did not, 83 to 66 percent. The researchers noted that these results are only suggestive, because the five Latin American and Spanish countries differed from the others in ways other than the value they placed on sympatía. And some countries not known for their sympatía had high rates of helping. Nevertheless, if a culture strongly values friendliness and prosocial behavior, people may be more likely to help strangers on city streets (Janoff-Bulman & Leggatt, 2002).

29. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Effects of Positive Moods: Feel Good, Do Good
84% of people who found coins researcher left in mall pay phone slots helped a man pick up papers in one study.
Only 4% of those who did not find coins helped.
When people are in a good mood, they are more helpful in a variety of ways.
People are more likely to help others when they are in a good mood for a number of reasons, including doing well on a test, receiving a gift, thinking happy thoughts, and listening to pleasant music (North, Tarrant, & Hargreaves, 2004).
And when people are in a good mood, they are more helpful in many ways, including contributing money to charity, helping someone find a lost contact lens, tutoring another student, donating blood, and helping co-workers on the job (Carlson, Charlin, & Miller, 1988; Isen, 1999; Salovey, Mayer, & Rosenhan, 1991).

30. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Being in a good mood can increase helping for three reasons:
Good moods make us look on the bright side of life.
If you saw the man drop his manila folder full of papers, you might think, “What a klutz. Let him clean up his own mess.” Or you might have some sympathy for him, thinking, “Oh, the poor guy, he probably feels really frustrated.” When we’re in a good mood, we tend to see the good side of other people, giving them the benefit of the doubt.
A victim who might normally seem clumsy or annoying will, when we are feeling cheerful, seem like a decent, needy person who is worthy of our help (Carlson et al., 1988; Forgas & Bower, 1987).

31. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Being in a good mood can increase helping for three reasons:
Good moods make us look on the bright side of life.
Helping others can prolong our good mood.
If we see someone who needs help, then being a Good Samaritan spawns even more good feelings, and we can walk away feeling terrific. In comparison, not helping when we know we should is a surefire “downer,” deflating our good mood (Clark & Isen, 1982; Isen, 1987; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005).

32. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Being in a good mood can increase helping for three reasons:
Good moods make us look on the bright side of life.
Helping others can prolong our good mood.
Good moods increase self-attention.
As we noted in Chapters 5 and 9, at any given time, people vary in how much attention they pay to their feelings and values versus the world around them. Sometimes we are particularly attuned to our internal worlds, and sometimes we are not. Good moods increase the amount of attention we pay to ourselves, and this factor in turn makes us more likely to behave according to our values and ideals. Because most of us value altruism and because good moods increase our attention to this value, good moods increase helping behavior (Berkowitz, 1987; Carlson et al., 1988; Salovey & Rodin, 1985).

33. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Negative-State Relief: Feel Bad, Do Good
One kind of bad mood clearly leads to an increase in helping—feeling guilty.
People often act on the idea that good deeds cancel out bad deeds.
(Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1994; Estrada-Hollenbeck & Heatherton, 1998)
One study found that churchgoers were more likely to donate money to charities before attending confession than afterward, presumably because confessing to a priest reduced their guilt (Harris, Benson, & Hall, 1975).
Thus if you just realized you had forgotten your best friend’s birthday and you felt guilty about it, you would be more likely to help the fellow in the mall, to repair your guilty feelings.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

34. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Negative-State Relief: Feel Bad, Do Good
Since feeling happy leads to greater helping, it might seem that sadness would decrease it.
Surprisingly, sadness can also lead to an increase in helping, at least under certain conditions.
When sad, people are motivated to do things that make them feel better. To the extent that helping is rewarding, it can lift us out of the doldrums.
(Carlson & Miller, 1987; Salovey et al., 1991)
(Wegener & Petty, 1994)

35. The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior
Negative-State Relief Hypothesis
The idea that people help in order to alleviate their own sadness and distress.
Negative-State Relief:
Feel Bad, Do Good
(Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973; Cialdini & Fultz, 1990; Cialdini et al., 1987)
It is an example of the social exchange theory approach to helping that we discussed earlier. People help someone else with the goal of helping themselves—namely, to relieve their own sadness and distress. This is pretty obvious if we help in a way that deals with the cause of our sadness. If our best friend is depressed, we might feel a little depressed as well, so if we do something to cheer up our friend, we’ve reduced the cause of our own sadness. However, when we feel blue, we are also more likely to help in some totally unrelated way. If we are feeling down because our best friend is unhappy, we are more likely to donate money to a charity. The warm glow of helping the charity reduces our gloom, even though the charity and our friend’s unhappiness are unrelated (Cialdini et al., 1973).
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

36. The End