1908 - William Mcdougall: "Introductory Manual of Social Psychology." It examined the impact of social variables on behavior. One of those variables was prosocial behavior.
McDougall thought that prosocial behavior derived from the parental instinct, but being something unobservable did not carry much weight at the time.
1964: Murder of Kitty Genovese: moment when interest in helping behavior is triggered.
Who was this woman? New Yorker who was murdered at the door of her apartment and despite asking for help, none of the neighbors (38 witnesses in total) called the police until after 30 minutes. Obviously she died.
Latané and Darley: Spectator Effect. Their main objective was to determine when people were helping and when they were not..
Prosocial behavior: It is more general. It refers to all behaviors that benefit others, thanks to which society works better: Recycle garbage.
Helping behavior: It is more specific. Action that benefits or improves the well-being of one or more people in particular: Helping someone who has fallen.
Altruism: It is more concrete. The motivation of the person giving the help is characterized by the emphasis on the needs of the other. Provide benefits to another without the expectation of receiving anything in return.
Cooperation: Includes two or more people working together towards a common goal that will benefit both.
Theories of evolution
Altruism is defined from 3 mechanisms:
1. Selection by relationship: What is really important for the survival of a species is the success in the transmission of genes to the next generation. Parents help their children, is what is known as inclusive biological efficacy.
However, this approach has been criticized, mainly due to the norm of social responsibility (we help those who depend on our help)
2. Reciprocal altruism: (Trivers 1971). An individual may make the decision to help another or not based on the expectation that the other will return the help to him or his relatives in the future. This mechanism is governed by the rule of reciprocity.
3. Group selection: When two groups compete with each other, the one who has more people willing to sacrifice for their group, or to cooperate with each other, will be able to be above a group in which selfish people predominate..
Biological and genetic bases of prosocial behavior
Here the concept of empathy is important.
Empathy is the ability to experience the same emotions as another person who is being observed. Empathy precedes many prosocial behaviors.
Preston and Waal: "Perception-action model": Attempts to explain empathy from the point of view of neuroanatomy. If a person pays attention to the emotional state of another, a representation of said emotional state is activated in his brain that generates a response associated with it..
However, a specific area of the brain where empathy is located has not been identified. What has been detected is a group of neurons with the ability to discharge impulses called mirror neurons. They are part of a perception-action system, so that the observation of movements of the hand or any other member, activates in the observer the same regions of the motor cortex as if he himself were performing those movements.
Development of helping behavior during the individual's life: 3 processes are involved in prosocial behavior in general:
3 explanatory mechanisms:
- Learning
- Social and personal moral values
- Activation / emotion
1. Learning:People learn to help by the principles of reinforcement and modeling.
-Reinforcement: We will learn to help if we are rewarded for it.
-Modeling: TV shows encourage helpful behavior through role models who behave prosocially.
2. Social and personal moral values: Norms such as social responsibility, reciprocity, etc. There are rules that we have internalized and that tell us when we have to help a person. Social factors are more important than biological factors in explaining prosocial behavior.
Schwartz (1977) - Difference between social and personal norms. People construct the norms for specific situations. Together with his friend Howard, he developed the process model of altruism in 5 steps:
Norms of social justice, such as equity, are also important.
Equity: Two people who make the same contribution should have the same reward.
The norms of reciprocity and social justice seem common to all societies, while the norm of social responsibility (helping those who depend on our help) is not universal. In collectivist cultures, people have much more internalized the norms of their own group, whereas individualistic cultures fulfill those norms due to the pressure of social desirability..
3. Activation and excitement: It has to do with the importance of emotional aspects in helping behavior. People are activated by the discomfort of others. This has two perspectives:
a) The person helps to reduce their own discomfort - selfish motivation (Robert Cialdini)
b) The person helps because they put themselves in the place of the other - altruistic motivation (Daniel Batson)
Selfish Motivation Perspective
"Relief from the negative state": People help to obtain a reward, avoid punishment or get rid of a negative emotional state. The motivation for which we help is selfish and also there is no relationship between helping behavior and empathic motivation.
Altruistic motivation perspective
Empathy: It is the capacity that consists of inferring the thoughts and feelings of others, which generates feelings of sympathy, understanding and tenderness.
There are 2 types of empathy:
Cognitive: Refers to taking someone else's perspective, putting yourself in their shoes.
Emotional (also known as sympathy): Has 2 variants
Parallel empathy: It consists of experiencing the same emotional responses that the other person experiences.
Reactive empathy: Reacting emotionally to the experiences that another person is experiencing.
Empathy can be trained through role-playing exercises through instructions to put yourself in someone else's shoes. The results show that other people are helped more when they have received instructions to empathize with them.
In short: The reasons why people help others combine emotional and cognitive factors that are closely related to each other..
This question refers to who helps more among men and women. Various studies show that women are more empathetic than men, however in physiological and non-verbal measures no gender differences have been found. It depends on the type of help and the social role.
Help type: It is assumed that in dangerous situations men help more.
Social role: A policewoman, firefighter or doctor despite facing dangerous situations should not have differences in her tendency to help with respect to a man.
On whether it helps the same in all cultures, there are also cultural differences in this type of behavior.
The role of culture and environment in helping behavior: The higher the population density, the less help is given to a stranger. However, there are also other factors at play, since in highly populated cities such as Calcutta for example, it presents high scores in helping behavior. The conclusion is that we cannot assume that an isolated variable (climate, population density, etc.) can be a determining factor in our helping behavior since the explanation is multi-causal.
People from countries with good economic, health and educational conditions are characterized by giving little help to a stranger. On the contrary, people with low economic income and who also live in unpleasant climates, are characterized by a more cooperative behavior. According to this, collectivist societies, being poorer, will help more than individualistic ones. One possible explanation is that collectivists establish more marked differences between the in-group and the out-group than individualists, and as a consequence they may cooperate more with members of their in-group, but they tend to be more competitive and distant with strangers. On the other hand, the individualists in case of providing help, do not take into account the group membership of the one who needs it.
However, something curious also happens: Latin collectivist cultures emphasize sympathy and this means that despite being collectivists they tend to help strangers more than individualist cultures (this is a bit the opposite of what was explained in the previous paragraph)
Conclusion: Through helping behavior we see how cultural values, socioeconomic variables and the environment intertwine with each other.
- Who we find attractive or like
- Who we find similar to us: Closely related to interpersonal attraction. It tends to help more a stranger but who is from their own country. Also the concept of defensive attribution makes us help someone who looks like us because we think that their situation could also happen to us. To counteract the defensive attribution we can blame her for what happens to her, this is known as attribution of responsibility to the victim. By holding him responsible for what happens to him, we distance ourselves from that person and justify our lack of solidarity-
Various studies have shown that we tend to help a person the most when we believe we are the only witnesses to their problem. If we think there are more witnesses, we don't help because we think someone else will help. This is known as diffusion of responsibility. When there are more people, not helping a victim can be justified because there are others who can do it instead of racism, so that personal norms and self-image as a non-racist person are safe.
- To those who are part of our own group: In an experiment, an accomplice wearing a Liverpool shirt pretended to have a problem with Manchester fans (rival team) to see if they would help him. In the first case, he did not receive help. However, if you go up a level higher and the positive aspects of being a good supporter of a soccer team become prominent, then they do help when you consider it “one of ours”. Therefore one strategy to get people to be willing to help others is to highlight identities that are inclusive rather than exclusive..
- Who we think deserve help: In these cases, the social responsibility standard is activated. On the subway, we are more likely to help a person who appears ill than a person who appears drugged. All this is also related to the theory of attribution, (topic 4), it is more likely that we help someone if we consider that if the situation has been produced by circumstances external to him.
Decision model on emergency intervention (Latané and Darley). This model emerged after the Kitty Genovese incident. According to the authors, in this case the neighbors could have thought that someone had called the emergency service and that is why they did not call themselves.
As a consequence of the results of the bystander effect, Latané and Darley developed a model that proposed that whether a person helps or not depends on a series of decisions that are summarized in 5 steps that include:
1- Recognize that something is happening
2- Recognize that the situation requires someone to help
3- Take responsibility to help
4- Consider yourself capable
5- Decide how to do it
The 5 steps of the decision model on emergency intervention:
Here the previous 5 steps are described point by point.
Step 1: Acknowledge that something is wrong. The first thing a person has to realize is that something strange is happening. If we are aware of other things, inattention can inhibit prosocial acts.
An experiment with different groups of people who were told that they had to go to a certain place to give a talk, depending on the group they were told that they were on time, that they arrived with time to spare or that they were late. Halfway through they met someone who needed help, logically those who helped the least were the members of the group who had been told that they were late for the talk.
Step 2: Recognize that the situation requires someone to help. Interpreting whether what is happening is an emergency will depend on how other people respond to the situation and whether or not it is clear that it is an emergency. The reaction of others can affect us in two ways:
I experiment in a room gradually filling with smoke. If the person left he was alone he quickly left the room. If, on the other hand, he was with people (accomplices) who were not disturbed by the smoke, the subject did not leave the room. This is related to pluralistic ignorance, it is a bias consisting of inhibiting the expression of an attitude or emotion because it is thought that the majority do not share it, although in reality it is not like that.
Step 3: Take Responsibility to Help. If we think we don't hold ourselves responsible for helping, we won't. This has to do with the diffusion of responsibility discussed above..
Step 4: Consider yourself capable of helping: If you don't think you are capable or don't know how to do it, you won't.
Step 5: Make the Decision to Help: Even if all of the above steps have been taken, the helping behavior may not take place because the costs of helping are too great. One of the reasons this happens is apprehension about evaluation (we worry that others will see how we behave or that they will judge our actions negatively)
There is another model that tries to explain when we help others:
Activation and cost-reward model
According to this model, people are motivated to maximize their rewards and minimize their costs. A person will help if the benefits of helping outweigh those of not helping.
Based on these premises, Piliavin and Dovidio elaborated their model of how the relationship between costs and benefits leads the person to help or not to help. The objective of this model is to predict whether or not a person will help and how they would help if they did. For help to occur, the person has to feel activated by knowing the problem of the other and interpreting that unpleasant activation as due to that and not another reason.
Activation and cost-reward model
COSTS OF HELPING LOWS + COSTS OF NOT HELPING LOWS
In this case, whether the person decides to help or not depends on personality variables, individual norms, the relationship between people, etc..
COSTS OF HELPING LOW + COSTS OF NOT HELPING HIGH
When this combination occurs, the most common is to help quickly.
COSTS OF HELPING HIGH + COSTS OF NOT HELPING LOW
You tend to deny the problem or avoid it
COSTS OF HELPING HIGH + COSTS OF NOT HELPING HIGH
Indirect help is sought (asking others to do so). The situation can also be reinterpreted to reduce the costs of not helping (attribution of responsibility to the victim, diffusion of responsibility, etc.)
To know to what extent people want others to help them, it is necessary to differentiate between the help that is requested and the one that is received without requesting it.
A) Help requested
Nadler- Whether or not a person decides to ask for help depends on:
1. Personal characteristics such as age, gender, personality, etc. Men have a harder time asking for help than women, etc..
2. The nature of the problem and the type of help needed. If a person's problem is directly related to their personal and social image, they will be less likely to turn to others for help. On the other hand, not being able to return the favor to another when we believe that we are expected to do so, is also a deterrent when asking for help..
3. The characteristics of the possible donor of the aid. Similar people are often used instead of those we consider very different.
However, not all helping behaviors are positive for the recipient. It is possible to react negatively when a threat to self-esteem is perceived, when there are excessive costs to be grateful for such help and when the help causes a feeling of loss of freedom in the recipient. There are several theories that explain the cause of these negative reactions:
Attribution theory: People are motivated to seek an explanation of why they need help and why others are offering it. They will maintain positive self-esteem if they can attribute their need for help to external or uncontrollable causes rather than personal deficiencies. The attribution made on the behavior of the people who help is also important, if we believe that they help us out of good will or that they do so thinking that we are incompetent. The effect on self-esteem in the person receiving the help was outlined in: (See figure 8.4, page 308)
Theory of social exchange: Explain the costs of appreciation. Reactions to receiving help reflect the benefits of receiving it, but also the costs of accepting it. For this reason, people are more willing to ask for help when they think they will be able to return the favor. But if they cannot or do not want to return it, they will try to avoid being helped or react in a negative way, acting in accordance with the norm of reciprocity..
B) Help that is received unintentionally
It can produce loss of freedom and this is explained by the reactance theory.
Reactance theory (we also saw it in Topic 6 on prohibitions and censorship). According to this theory, people want to maximize their personal freedom of choice. A person receiving help may feel that he is losing his freedom since he thinks that another person would better solve his problem, he may also feel obliged to return the help received. All of this can trigger hostility towards the person helping.
Also, being dependent on the help of others is something that is not viewed favorably in most societies. For this reason, some people may give up the idea of seeking help..
Nadler presented a model of intergroup helping relations as power relations based on two premises:
1. Social identity theory: any information that makes the members of one group feel that they are inferior to those of another would pose a threat to their identity.
2. Helping relationships are influenced by power relationships. Members of a high-status group would help those of a low-status group, not driven by altruistic motivation but by maintaining their social advantage..
Traditionally, there has not been much interest on the part of psychologists to consider the group as a potential to promote helping behavior. However, this trend is changing especially since the rise of voluntary organizations.
Characteristics of the types of behaviors that are included within group helping behavior.
Planned Help Behavior: Volunteering
Volunteering is a non-compulsory helping behavior, which is carried out in a planned way and through the management of an organization, and which is not punctual, but rather takes place over a relatively long period of time. It must be planned, through material and human means.
One of the differences with interpersonal help behavior is that the latter usually includes a feeling of personal obligation towards the recipient, while volunteers often do not know the people they are helping.
4 characteristics of volunteering (Penner, 2002)
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