L15 - Helping Pt 1 Flashcards
Define Altruism?
- Helping that benefits others but requires self-sacrifice on the part of the helper
- No regard for personal consequences/potential harm
- No expectation of reward
What is pro-social behaviour?
- Helping that benefits others, regardless of motives - broader category
- Many prosocial acts are not altruistic BUT can be to impress others
What are the 5 perspectives on helping?
- Decision-making
- Learning
- Social Norms
- Evolutionary
- Social Exchange Theory
What is the decision making perspective?
A number of decisions need to be made that influence helping behaviour in a potential emergency
What are the overall stages in deciding to help:
1) Perceiving a Need
A - Notice the situation
B - Is it an emergency
2) Taking responsibility
3) Weigh costs/benefits
4) How should I help?
What was a study for Noticing the Situation
- In a room, man in hall falls of ladder, for some ppts = he cries out
- More & faster helping when ppts hear victim cry
- Cue gives clear indication
What was a study for Is It An Emergency?
- Students study in lab alone, apparent emergency = smoke
- Many ppts took no action as didn’t perceive event as emergency
- e.g leaky air con, chem lab, steam pipes, truth gas etc.
- Some assumed it was an exp and socially endured discomfort of room
What was a study for Taking Responsibility?
- While at beach, person near you goes for swim, asks to watch their belongings (or not) which are then stolen
- Ppts are 3x more likely to help when made a commitment to stranger
What was a study for Weighing Costs and Benefits?
- Male ppts witnesses staged quarrel between couple
- Condition 1: female says “go away, I’ve never seen you before” OR condition 2: “…Wish I had never married you”
- 3X as much intervention in condition 1 as perceived greater costs
What was a study for How Can I Help?
- More likely to help when you feel competent
- Another ladder accident
- Nurses helped more than control ppts after hearing person fall from ladder
What is the learning perspective?
- Learn to help through reinforcement, modelling and observational learning
- Evidence that modelling and reinforcement have positive impacts for adults and children
What was a study for Reinforcement?
- Children asked to share toys
- When children were rewarded with dispositional praise = pronounced long term effect on prosocial behaviour compared to general praise e.g you’re nice vs that was nice
What was a study for Modelling?
- Driving and see a driver helping someone, 1 mile later, you pass someone with a flat tire
- More likely to help if you’ve observed another’s helping behaviour
What was a study for Observation?
- Elevation: uplifting positive feelings experienced after observing another person perform a virtuous act
- Ppts see clip of either musicians thanking their music teachers, fawlty towers clip OR documentary about ocean life
- DV = will ppts help in completing another experiment? (amount of time given up to do another exp)
- RESULTS: The elevation condition would spend more time (2x) to help exp. Then humour and then control (measuring positive affect)
What is the social norms perspective?
- Internalise social rules about helping
- Help because society dictates that we help
What are the three key norms?
- Social responsibility - help those dependent on us
- Reciprocity - help those who help us
- Social justice - norms about fairness and equity
What is the evolutionary perspective?
- Is helping in the genes?
- More likely to help those genetically most close to ourselves e.g healthy offspring
- Help strangers = norm of reciprocity?
What is the exchange perspective?
- Help is rewarding because we might need help in the future
- It relieves distress of seeing someone suffer
- We get positive feedback
- Can alleviate physical pain
What are the benefits of helping?
1) Volitional prosocial actions results in increased well-being for both the help giver and recipient, through the satisfaction of basic needs related to autonomy
2) After performing altruistic actions, Ppts brain activity in response to a painful shock was significantly reduced
What is the Empathy-altruism model?
- Helping reflects self-serving and selfless goals
- Three key motives: empathetic concern, social reward and personal distress
- Empathetic concern - imagining feelings of another person, having positive regard towards someone else
What did Toi and Batson do? (Car accident)
- Ppts learn about student in bad car accident where they may need to drop out of university
- Manipulated empathy and costs of not helping e.g imagine how she feels, and will we see her in class
- When empathy was high, regardless of costs of no help, ppts gave more help
- When empathy = low, AND cost of no help = high = more help from ppts
- When empathy low & cost of no help low = less help
What was a study on everyday empathy?
- 246 ppts were prompted on phone 7x a day on 7 consecutive days
- At each point, measured current happiness, well-being, had empathy opportunity, received/offer empathy OR performed kind act in last 15 mins
- RESULTS: opportunities to express empathy very common: ppts who noticed more empathy opps and emphasised more, reported greater happiness and well-being. If people were less confident to emphasised = well-being was lower
- Women emphasised more than men, politically liberal ppts were more empathetic towards strangers than tories
