Chapter 7: Being the Helper and Being Helped Flashcards
What is a trait?
Trait: a relatively stable predisposition to think/behave in a particular way
- Traits are more likely to influence behaviour when situational norms are weak/ambiguous. Personality traits are assumed to be normally distributed throughout the entire population, and people differ widely on where they fall on the distribution.
- Personality theorists believe that some people do consistently exhibit prosocial tendencies across time and situations, and some differences in willingness to help are due to differences among them in their personality traits.
- In circumstances where the cues are weak and the norms of how a person should be expected to act are weak, personality traits are more important causes of behaviour
What did Oliner & Oliner find in the Altruistic Personality study?
They studied personalities of “rescuers” and “non-rescuers” during the holocaust
Rescuers reported warm and stable relationships with parents (secure attachment), while non-rescuers reported less stable relationships; difficult to say if it is gene based or socialized based
Rescuers also reported a greater perceived similarity to Jews.
Rescuers were high in empathy, sense of responsibility for welfare of others, and self-efficacy; even 45 years after the war they were more likely to still be involved in helping others.
What is the interpersonal reactivity index and what are it’s four subscales? What did Carlo et al. find using the IRI with the “Elaine” study?
Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) measures individual differences in empathy, with four subscales:
a. Perspective taking; how often do they take the point of views of others
b. Empathic concern; how often they experience sympathy or compassion for others
c. Personal distress; how often they experience distress in response to another’s distress
d. Fantasy; the ability to imagine oneself in hypothetical situations
Carlo et al. re-did the “Elaine” study and found that participants who score high on IRI were more likely to take place of confederate receiving shocks (even when the escape was easy)
What are the two dimensions of the Prosocial Personality Battery?
- Other-oriented empathy (empathic concern + social responsibility); agreeableness is an important trait for this dimension
- Estimate the cost of helping others as lower, report more sympathy, and more likely to help a friend with a personal problem
- The higher the score of other-oriented empathy, the faster they responded in an emergency - Helpfulness (propensity to act helpfully); a good predictor of small, everyday, low-cost behaviours
- Correlate with willingness to be an organ donor, the number of charities they volunteer for, and willingness to serve as a mentor in a large organization
- Positively associated with a sense of self-efficiency, personal competence, and a need to master and control one’s environment
What did Eisenberg’s longitudinal study find on empathy?
4 year olds were observed during free play to determine how often they helped and shared
Participants scores on personality measures of altruism were stable over time
Sharing toys at 4 predicted helpful traits at 25.
What are some reasons we will not ask for help?
- Can make us feel incompetent (threat to self-esteem)
- “Charity wounds him who receives” - Mauss
- Developing countries often feel resentment towards the donor countries
- Men are less willing to seek help; women are on average 2x more likely to ask for help
- A tendency to seek helps drops (for both genders) at 7 or 8 and it drops again after age 60 - We don’t like to feel indebted to others
Can arouse reactance
Potential solutions: “pay it forward”, gofundme - Others help can be ineffective
ex. bad advice - Too shy/embarrassed
- Low in dispositional gratitude
What is Fisher & Nadler’s Threat-to-Self-Esteem Model and describe their experiment.
Help experiences as:
a. Self-supportive when recipient feels appreciated/cared for
b. Self-threatening when recipient feels inferior and overly dependent
Participants played a game for which they’d receive money for good performance, they were told they had a partner but this was simply to create a threat
The game was rigged and they were losing all their money, but told that their partner was doing well and could share their money to keep them in the game
I.V 1: told their partner shared similar or different values/interests than them
I.V 2: partner either helps or doesn’t help
Found that participants who received help from similar partners felt sadder, less confident, able and intelligent; they can do it so why can’t I? This was found especially among participants with high self-esteem.
Describe the “Paradox Help-Seeking” and the experiment that supports this paradox.
The “Paradox of help-seeking”:
If we don’t ask, we don’t get help with the problem
If we do ask, we get help but it takes a hit to our self-esteem
Solution: strike a compromise
Participants were university students, gave choice of several different people that they could confide in of their problems, such as:
- Other students with same problems, but different coping mechanisms (similar peers)
- Other students with different problems, but with training in dealing with problems (trained para-professionals)
- Professional experts
For both social and academic problems, participants had a preference of talking to similar peers with the same problems but with better coping mechanisms (not professionals)
They wanted someone who could help them but not someone who is overqualified, this is an internal compromise.
We often choose a helper that we believe is more competent in an area than we are, or if the a person’s self-esteem is threatened and they want to bolster their self-mage, they will select someone with less competence
What are some consequences for the helper?
- Rejection creates negative feelings in would-be helpers, and gives us negative assessment of rejecter
- Burnout among helping professionals
What are the “big five” core personality traits proposed by Ashton et al.?
- Neuroticism
- Extroversion
- Openness
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- These traits are responsible for individual differences in prosocial actions.
- Agreeableness is associated with trust and tender-mindedness; people higher on agreeableness are more cooperative with others and volunteer more
- Conscientiousness relates to competence and reliability; people higher on conscientiousness are more active blood donors
What is an attachment style? What are the different attachment styles?
Attachment style refers to how a person relates to other people, especially people with whom the person has a close personal relationship.
- Secure; people desire close relations with others and find them calming
- Fearful-avoidant; the person desires intimate contact with others but it makes them anxious
- Dismissing-avoidant; the person does not desire a lot of contact with intimate others
How do different attachment styles affect prosocial behaviour?
Mikulincer and Shaver found:
- Secure attachment are able to concern themselves with others need and welfare because they are not as worried about what will happen to themselves.
- Avoidant attachment is negatively associated with willingness to volunteer or donate blood
- Anxious style volunteer primarily for selfish or egoistic reasons
What feelings are associated with being rejected as a helper?
- Rejection creates negative feelings in potential helpers and decreases their liking for the person who rejected them
- Spurned helpers explain the rejection by saying the person who rejecting them were stubborn, had to much pride, or there was a lack of trust
- Cognitive dissonance theory: the rejected helpers were trying to rationalize or explain away this unpleasant and unexpected outcome
What did Moore and Allen conclude in regards to adolescents volunteering?
Students who scored below reading level and participated in volunteering to tutor were more likely to have lower dropout rates, and a better reading grade, self-concept and perception of quality of school life after two years
By using random assignment (control group & tutoring group) they eliminated selection bias which would have explained that adolescents who volunteer more are less deviant
“At risk” youth either chose to volunteer or not, and after eight years those who volunteered were slightly less likely to fail a course or be suspended from school, had a 33% lower rate of pregnancy, and a 50% lower rate of school dropout
What are the effects of volunteering in adults?
- There’s a positive relationship between the number of voluntary memberships and indicators of psychological health, such as increased self-esteem, decreased depression, and greater life satisfaction
- There is a dose-response effect (the greater the amount of drugs, the greater the effects) in adults for volunteering; more volunteering is directly associated with better personal outcomes.
