9. Pro-social behaviour Flashcards
What is pro-social behaviour?
An action that is positively valued by society.
An action intended to benefit one more people other than oneself.
What is bystander apathy?
When people witness a situation in which other people seem to require help, but refuse to provide this help and instead do nothing.
Explain the bystander effect.
Latine and Darley proposed the diffusion hypothesis/ bystander effect- Ironically, when there are more people present at the point at which someone requires help, tnhe likelihood of any of those people helping decreases because responsibility for helping is diffused among those people who are present. The responsibility for intervening is shared among observers present, and so the likelihood that any one person will help is diminished.
Explain research into the bystander effect.
In a study, participants took part in what they thought was a discussion of problems associated with being at university. They were led down a corridor with multiple rooms and into one where there was a pair of headphones and microphones so they could join the group discussion. They were led to believe that there were other participants in the other rooms and that they were all taking part in a recorded discussion. In this discussion, only one person’s microphone could be on at any one time. The person who spoke first described having had difficulty adjusting to university life; he mentioned that he was prone to seizures which made things difficult for him. Other participants then chipped in with their own thoughts about university life and the participant went last in the discussion. The other ‘participants’ were actually just pre-recorded by researchers. After the participant spoke it went back to the person who said they had seizures. As he talked, he became louder and incoherent and appeared to be having a seizure. Because the person having a seizure had his microphone on , the participant had no way of communicating with any other participants. Researchers were interested in what would determine whether and how quickly the participants sought help for the person having a seizure by leaving the test room.
There were several conditions; there was a two person group (the true participant and the one who had the seizure were the only participants), a three person group and a six person group.
As soon as the participant begun supposedly having a seizure, the experimenter started a stop watch to see how long it took the participant to leave the cubicle. Just after 2 minutes of starting to have a seizure, the microphone of the participant having the seizure was cut off which was to be interpreted as their allotted time having elapsed. If after six minutes the participant had not emerged from their cubicle, the experiment was terminated.
RQ: Will the presence of other people decrease the likelihood of seeking help and increase the time taken to seek help?
It was found that in the 2 person group, every participant sought help with the average amount of time it took for them to leave the cubicle being 52 seconds. This rose to 93 seconds in the second group and 166 seconds in the third group. The likelihood of someone receiving help seemed to decrease as the number of people who could help increased.
Explain Latine’s follow up studu
Participants were invited to take part in what they were told was an interview about problems in university life. They were asked to sit in a waiting room and complete a questionnaire. They were told that the interviewer would come meet them. After completing two pages of the questionnaire, white smoke started to enter the room. This carried on for up to six minutes.
Participants were in one of 3 conditions; they were either alone in the waiting room, with two passive confederates who tried to avoid conversation and looked briefly at the smoke when it started before looking away, or with two other naive participants.
The waiting room was behind a one way mirror and researchers were watching to see how participants would respond.
RQ: Would the presence of other people reduce the likelihood that people would leave the room to report the smoke, and where people did report the smoke would the presence of others extend the amount of time it would take participants to do so?
It was found that when participants were alone in the room, 75 percent of them went to seek help. It took them an average of 2 minutes to do so. When there were 2 passive confederates in the room, only 10 percent of participants reported the smoke. Where there were three naive participants, one participant reported the smoke which took them a long time. In one group, the participant left to seek help within four minutes but in two of the groups it took between 4-6 minutes.
This shows that the presence of other people seems to inhibit intervention in emergency situations.
The experimenters interviewed the participants after the experiment to establish why they didn’t intervene. They didn’t tell them that the smoke was part of the experiment but instead asked how they had got on with the questionnaire. At this point, every participant mentioned the smoke. This led to a conversation about the smoke itself- when participants were asked why they did or didn’t report the smoke the major factor appeared to be whether they thought the smoke was meaningful. Those who did report it weren’t entirely sure what the smoke was but felt it as unusual enough to be worth reporting. People didn’t seem to recognise the influence of other’s on their own behaviour- they thought that the most important determinant of whether they reported the smoke was whether or not it was an emergency.
Explain Latané and Darley’s study into the impact of being in a rush on helping others.
This study suggested that people who are in a rush might be less likely to help.
Participants too part in what they believed to be a study of their specific religious beliefs and completed a questionnaire about these beliefs. They were then told they ha to go to another building to take part in the next part of the procedure which would involve them giving a talk. There were 2 independent variables:
Subject of the talk: in one condition, participants were told that the talk would be about the good samaritan- people who help others when there’s no clear basis for doing so. In another condition, participants were told they’d be giving an unrelated talk about the types of jobs people of different religions are most suited to.
Urgency: In one condition, participants were told they needed to rush to the building and in the second condition they were told there was no hurry.
On their way to the building, the participants had to pass a man who had slumped in a doorway.
RQ: How likely would participants be to help the man? Would they be affected by the subject of the talk they were about to give or by how much of a rush they were in?
It was found that the subject of the talk didn’t predict helping but whether or not participants were in a hurry did. Those who were in a hurry were less likely to give help.
This might be because of attention: if you’re in a rush then all your metal resources are focused on the task at hand and be less likely to notice someone needing help.
Explain Latane and Darley’s bystander intervention model.
The model proposes a series of considerations a person progresses through before deciding to intervene and provide help. If a person answers no at any stage of the process, they will decide not to help.
- Emergency occurs*
1. Person has to notice the event which required their help
2. People have to interpret the event as an emergency or at least as a situation which requires some sort of intervention
3. The person must assume responsibility for intervening
4. The person has to decide how to intervene
5. Person intervenes
What is altruism?
An action that is performed to benefit a person without benefitting the self.
To act out of concerns for others’ welfare as well as one’s own.
Explain Toi and Batson’s study into empathy.
It has been proposed that people who help tend to feel greater empathy for those people in need.
This study tested the hypothesis that greater empathy leads to greater altruism. The participants were female psychology undergraduates and they were asked to listen to interviews on the news programme, including a new style of programme which focused mostly on personal experiences. Each participant was led to believe that there were multiple news tapes and that the tape they were allocated would not be heard by anybody else. Participants were asked to adopt a particular perspective while listening to the programme; they were either asked to be as objective as possible and just listen carefully to all the information but not concern themselves with how the interviewee feels, or they were asked to imagine how the person in the interview feels and not to concern themselves with listen to all the information. One interview they heard was about an undergraduate student called Carol who spoke about the difficulties she had faced after losing both her legs in a car crash. Next, participants were asked to rate the programmes they had heard and their own emotional responses to them. When the experimenter brought in the rating questionnaire, they seemed flustered and stated that they couldn’t find the right questionnaire but that the participant should go ahead and complete the emotional response questionnaire. Also included with the questionnaire was a note from the lead researcher on the project addressed to the student listening to the Carol tape- the researcher explained that while putting the procedure together he had discovered that Carol was a student at the participants own university and that she was looking for someone to share their class notes with her so she could catch up on the material she had missed while in hospital. Carol made it clear that the quality of the notes wasn’t important and she just wanted to catch up on what she had missed. The researchers manipulated how important Carol’s plea for help was- in one condition, Carol made it clear she could get the material from somewhere else but it would be preferable to also have it from someone in the class (this was the situation in which it would be easy to avoid giving help to Carol) and in another condition she stated that she would be going back to class next week and as she would be noticeable in her wheelchair participants should expect to see her in person (this is the situation in which it would be hard to avoid helping Carol).
It was found that where helping was seen as being difficult to avoid, rates of helping did not differ according to the empathy manipulation. However, where helping was seen as optional, there was greater helping among those in the condition where participants had been asked to empathise with Carol.
This tells us:
- People who feel empathy for another person’s plight are more likely to help them
- Empathy isn’t a trait; while some people may be more empathetic than others, the study shows that we can be primed to feel empathy for others.
Explain Haidt’s four emotion families of moral emotions
Moral emotions are emotions that we experience because something that has happened that violates our sense of what is morally right or just.
Hiadt pointed to 4 clusters of moral emotions:
Other emotions: emotions you experience because you look down on someone- contempt, anger, disgust
Self-conscious: if you do something bad you may feel shame, guilt or embarrassment
Other-suffering: Distress at another’s distress, sympathy/compassion, empathy
Other praising: awe, gratitude
People who experience greater other suffering emotions are more likely to help others. Those who report feeling greater empathy and compassion also report feeling greater guilt at not helping.
Empathy may provide 2 functions in motivating people to provide help:
- by adopting someone’s person perspective we better recognise their need for help
- our compassion for others makes it harder for us to avoid helping
Explain social value orientation.
Competitor: MOtivated not only by the desire to have more resources than the other but to maximise the advantage over the other person.
Individualist: The division of resources is more to your benefit than others
Cooperator: Willing to forego some self benefit in order to help another person- this increases collective resources and fairness
These are all types of social value orientation: this isa bout the relative value you place on positive outcomes for other people versus yourself.
It has been suggested that social value orientation is linked to a willingness to engage in altruistic acts.
Explain research into social value orientation and altruism.
644 psychology undergraduates completed a socail value orientation measure in class. Two weeks other the term finished, participants received a letter stating that the participant pools were running dry and more participants were urgently needed to ensure that research could continue at the university. Participants had to indicate on the form how much time they’d be able to contribute to the participant pool- any amount up to a maximum of 10 hours.
Researchers were interested in how many people would even return the form and of those who did, how much time on average they would agree to contribute, and if results on these two measures would differ according to social value orientation.
It was found that everyone returned the form but there were significant differences in the amount of time people offered to contribute.
The cooperators offered an average of 5 hours. Individualists and competitors offered significantly less.
The likelihood of offering some help didn’t depend on social value orientation however the degree of help offered did. Those with more pro-social value orientations were likely to offer to sacrifice more of their time.
Why do people work together to provide help in some situations?
Social identity theorists argue that key to these events is that members of the crowd have a sense of solidarity with each other because they identify with other people within the collective. When people identify with others, they ultimately begin to treat those other people as extensions of themselves as they are ingroup members.
Drury et al. undertook a qualitative analysis of interviews with survivors of disasters and found evidence to suggest that people who identify with a particular collective tend to be more likely to help people who they see as being part of their ingroup.
The social identity perspective suggests that people come to identify with a higher order collective and with each other when they feel they share a common fate- they are all subject to some external force that will determine their fate.
Shared experiences of emergencies can bring people to shift their level of identification so they no longer see each other as strangers or individuals and instead view each other as being part of a spontaneously formed ingroup by virtue of the fact they’re all facing the same problem. As a result, people become more likely to help others who are caught up in this situation. Ironically, this theory suggests people are being selfish when performing altruistic acts as they see other people as being extensions of themselves.
Explain Drury et al.’s research into how people behave in emergency situations.
Drury et al. conducted a study into how people behave in emergency situations. They used a virtual reality procedure designed to simulate a real life event of a fire.
Participants are in the station and a fire occurs and they are told that they need to evacuate the station as soon as possible. As they move towards the exit of the station, they came across people who were not able to evacuate and if they wish to, they could press a button to help the person. However, if they do this then there will be a delay in them getting out of the station and so the chance they will die is increased. This behaviour is labelled as cooperation. The participant could also behave in an antisocial way by pushing a button to push people out of their way on the escalators. This behaviour was termed competition.
Researchers used this paradigm to test the effect that different variables would have on helping behaviour. In one study, identification with those in the station was manipulated. In one condition, participants were supposedly returning with from a student demonstration with a large group of other members of their university and in another condition they were simply told that the station was filled with other people such as tourists (people they will not identify with). It was found that when people identify with the other people they were more likely to cooperate and less likely to compete. In the next study, they manipulated crowd size with one condition having 8 other characters and the other having 32. In one condition, they were among fellow football fans and in the other they were among tourists and strangers. It was found that people were more likely to help others in the identification condition however there was no impact of crowd size. This suggests that helping other people did not occur because of there being a reduced diffusion of responsibility, but rather that it had to do with identification. This is why people sometimes help complete strangers- the participant might identify as being part of their ingroup.
How does social identity theory explain the impact of group size?
Whether or not help is provided depends on what people consider to be socially normative. Sharing a social identity with a person in need of help will increase the likelihood you will help them because there is a clear social norm to behave in a way which maximises positive outcomes for other members of your group.
When other people are present and not helping a person who might seem to be in need of help, this implies that the predominant social norm in that situation is to not provide help. The group size, which is usually interpreted as diffusion of responsibility, might simply reflect the salience of the norm- when there are many people not intervening the norm of not intervening is made clearer. The mechanism by which increased group size reduces the likelihood of help might just reflect the perceived social norm of the ingroup of not helping the person needing help.
