What is prosocial behavior? What’s the difference with helping behavior and altruism?
Prosocial behavior - Acts that are positively valued by society
Helping behavior - Sub-category of prosocial behavior where the act is intentional and benefits someone else
Altruism - Sub-category of helping behavior where the helper does not expect any personal gain
Why? Because biology and evolution
- Mutualism - Cooperative behavior benefits the cooperator and the others
- Kin selection - Your help is biased towards blood relatives to perpetuate your own genes
- Fitness altruism - Why would you put yourself in danger for the sake of others? Because common good, you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your specie
Why? Because empathy
You experience 2 states when you see someone suffer:
- Arousal
- Empathy - You feel someone else’s suffering and identify as if it were your own -> It’s unpleasant so you try to avoid it
What’s the difference between empathy and compassion?
- Empathy - ‘What would I feel like?’
- Compassion - ‘What does this person feel like?’ - Concerned with perspective taking, putting yourself in the victim’s shoes
Bystander-calculus model
You calculate the costs and benefits of helping someone. There are 2 types of costs:
- Empathy costs of not helping - Experiencing distress
- Personal costs of not helping - Blame, social exclusion…
What factors make you more likely to help someone?
- Alone
- Clarity of the emergency
- Severity of the emergency
- Closeness of the bystander
- Relationship between the bystander and the victim (also in terms of similarity)
- ‘Perceived effort’ of the victim - You need to believe that the victim is trying to get better
Link to attribution - The belief that help will be effective:
- The victim is a special case
- The need is temporary
Can you learn to be more helpful? How?
- Helping is not innate, it is a learned behavior (= social learning theory). How do you learn?
- Giving instructions - Telling others to be helpful
- Using reinforcement
- Exposure to models - Because of modelling
What is the role of attribution in prosocial behavior?
2 main implications:
- You think you are helpful (someone told you so or you’ve established so yourself) so you help more to confirm that idea -> You’ve internalized it
- Just world hypothesis, people get what they deserve, this leads to victim blaming -> More likely if the victim is human made rather than a consequence of a natural disaster
What is an emergency?
- Danger
- Unusual event
- Which can differ in nature
- Not foreseen
- Requires instant action
Because an emergency is unpredictable and unusual, we do not know how to act, we look for others to know which behavior we should adopt -> Bystander effect
What is Latané and Darley’s cognitive model of bystander decisions?
The idea that whether a person helps depends on the outcomes of a series of decisions:
- Do we see that something is happening and that help is required?
- How de we interpret this event? Do we define it as an emergency?
- Do we accept personal responsibility for helping?
- What should I do?
- (5. Is help already given? What are others doing?)
How does the presence of others affect our response?
- Bystander effect - The more people the slower the response. We just need to believe that someone is there
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Audience inhibition - We are scared to be judge for overreacting/doing something wrong
- Social influence - We look for others as a model for action (= pluralistic ignorance, no one knows how to act, we all mimic each other)
- The bystander effect is stronger when the bystanders are anonymous and have no chance of future encounter (where they might be held accountable)
Interesting! If you’re alone, you are more likely to help if the danger is non-threatening to you but if the danger is also threatening to you, than you are more likely to help if there is someone else (which could offer you support)
What are the personal differences which can help display prosocial behavior?
- Good mood/bad mood
- Personal attributes - Relative to the victim, stronger person, ability to forgive (because you take more responsibility)
- Living in a smaller city
- Feelings of embarrassment
- Different attachment styles (secure/anxious/avoidant)
- Terror management theory
- Personal skills/competences
- Leaders v. followers - Leaders have responsibility
- Gender differences? Men are more helpful in public than in private and vice versa
What are the norms for helping?
- Not everyone always wants to be helped. This can vary through culture
- Reciprocity norm - If I helped you, you should help me too
- Social responsibility norm - We should give help even if it does not benefit us
What are the motives for helping?
- Egoism - Because it’s beneficial to you
- Altruism - Because it’s beneficial to others
- Collectivism - Because it’s beneficial to others (or the common good)
- Principlism - As a matter of principle, for the sake of morality. Because it’s ‘the right thing to do’
