Chapter 13 Flashcards
What is prosocial behaviour?
Acts that are positively valued by society, often behaviour contributing to the physical/psychological well-being of another person > it also includes helping behaviour and altruism
What is helping behaviour?
Acts that intentionally benefit someone else.
What is altruism?
A special form of helping behaviour, sometimes costly, that shows concern for fellow human
beings and is performed without expectation of personal gain.
What is empathy?
Ability to feel another person’s experiences; identifying with and experiencing another
person’s emotions, thoughts and attitudes.
What is the bystander calculus model?
In attending to an emergency, the bystander calculates the perceived costs and benefits of providing help compared with those associated with not helping. It starts with a physiological arousal as an empathetic response, labeling the arousal as empathic concern and then calculating the costs.
What are the empathy costs of not helping?
Piliavin’s view that failing to help can cause distress to a bystander who empathises with a victim’s plight.
What are personal costs of not helping?
Piliavin’s view that not helping a victim in distress can be costly to a bystander (e.g. experiencing blame).
What is empathic concern?
An element in Batson’s theory of helping behaviour. In contrast to personal distress (which may lead us to flee from the situation), it includes feelings of warmth, being soft-hearted and having compassion for a person in need.
What is social learning theory?
The view championed by Bandura that human social behaviour is not innate but learned from appropriate models.
What is learning by vicarious experience?
Acquiring a behaviour after observing that another person was rewarded for it.
What is the just-world hypothesis?
According to Lerner and Miller, people need to believe that the world is a just place where they get what they deserve. As evidence of undeserved suffering undermines this belief, people may conclude that victims deserve their fate.
What is the bystander intervention?
This occurs when an individual breaks out of the role of a bystander and helps another person in an emergency.
What is the bystander effect?
People are less likely to help in an emergency when they are with others than when alone. The greater the number, the less likely it is that anyone will help.
What is the diffusion of responsibility?
Tendency of an individual to assume that others will take responsibility (as a result, no one does). This is a hypothesised cause of the bystander effect.
What is the fear of social blunders?
The dread of acting inappropriately or of making a foolish mistake witnessed by others. The desire to avoid ridicule inhibits effective responses to an emergency by members of a group.
What is the reciprocity principle?
This is sometimes called the reciprocity norm, or ‘the law of doing unto others what they do to you’. It can refer to an attempt to gain compliance by first doing someone a favour, or to mutual aggression, or to mutual attraction.
What is the social responsibility norm?
The idea that we should help people who are dependent and in need. It is contradicted by another norm that discourages interfering in other people’s lives.
How is aggression similar to prosocial behaviour?
They both have perspective-specific differences and interpretation.
How did the study of prosocial behaviour emerge?
There was a shift to focus on positive psychology, yet there was still emphasis on non-prosocial behaviour.
How is prosocial behaviour and altruism different?
prosocial behaviour is more broad
Why do people help?
- Evolutionary advantage - helping kins
- Bystander-calculus model
- Empathy-altruism hypothesis
- Helping as a learned behaviour via reinforcement and modelling
What is the empathy-altruism hypothesis?
It starts with seeing someone needing help, is it a valued other or a stranger and taking their perspective. This all leads to empathy and then, helping behaviour.
Why so people refrain from helping?
- Cognitive model
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Audience inhibition/fear of social blunders
- Social influence - other people’s behaviour suggests that the situation is not serious
What is the cognitive model for refraining from helping?
- Do you notice the event
- Do you define it as an emergency
- Can you assume responsibility
- Can you decide on what can be done
- Can you do it?
Do intergroup relations affect helping behaviour?
There is more preference for ingroup members - ingroup bias. There is only help with a common ingroup identity to outgroup members, if a superordinate group membership is salient.
Why do we offer support to others?
- Egoistic motives
- Altruism
- Reciprocity beliefs
- Norms
- Maintain/reinforce or gain power
- Create a favourable impression
- Protect the group social identity
What are the communicative aspects of help?
- Being able to help shows competence and control over valuable resources and superiority
- Being dependent on help can be seen as incompetence, having a lack of resources and being inferior
What are the different types of help?
- Dependency oriented help - provides a full solution to the problem, reflects the helper’s view that the needy can not help themselves and reinforces the differential status of the groups
- Autonomy-oriented help - instrumental for the less powerful group to improve its position and become independent
What are the cross-cultural factors of helping behaviour?
There is more of a bystander effect in big cities, strength of the economy (lower the economy, higher the help given) and there is no difference between individualism/collectivism.
