L16 - Helping Pt 2 Flashcards
When do people help?
- Presence of others
- Physical Env
- Salient Cues
What was the study on presence of others?
- 38 people heard a woman being stabbed to death but did not help
- Large number of people made it less likely for help to be offered because they think others will take action = Bystander effect
What is diffusion of responsibility?
- Reduction of sense of urgency to help someone involved in an emergency or dangerous situation, based on assumption that others who are present will help
What is a study showing Noticing/Deciding in groups?
- Students work by themselves or with two strangers
- Working alone - 50% smoke report to E in 2 mins
- When in group, only 12% report in 2
What is a study showing Taking Responsibility in groups?
- Intercom-based study
- Ppts told that to guarantee anonymity, placed in different rooms, Exp would not listen to discussion
- No ppts present, manipulate how many others you perceive are present
- Hear recording where accomplice lapses into epileptic seizure
- Highest % time of immediate help offered was highest when perceived other members = 0, and lowest when more people were perceived to be on the call
- Time taken to help was shortest when no others were believed to be present but was longest when more others believed to be present
Do the others need to be real?
1) Ppts asked to imagine they’re having supper with 30 people, 10 people or CONTROL
- Estimate the % of salary they expect to donate to charity upon graduation
- They donate less when they imagine themselves in a larger group in mins (reduces individual accountability)
2) Ppts asked to imagine having supper with 30 people, 1 person or a control - looking at how accessible unaccountability is
- Presented with letter strings on a computer screen and asked if it was a word
- Neutral words, words unrelated to unaccountability, non-words
- Reaction time was faster for those in the 30 group where unaccountability words were given. Neutral words had the same reaction time for both sets of ppts
What is the responsive bystander?
- Does relationship to other potential helpers matter?
- Does group size increase intervention if we are among friends?
What was a study showing the responsive bystander?
- Ppts were told to imagine walking through town
- Walking in same direction as 1/5 other people who are either friends/strangers
- You see a man and a woman arguing and the man slaps the woman and grabs her jacket
- DV = how likely to intervene
- When with 1 stranger = medium intention to help, with more strangers, less intention to help
- When with 1 friend = medium intention to help (less than 1 stranger intention to help), but highest intention to help when with multiple friends
What was a study examining real-life, dangerous events?
- Looked at if danger affects bystander intervention in real-life conflicts by using CCTV
- Looked at video clips in different countries from police during the night and in tourist areas
- Clips contained one/more cues: agitated talking/gestures/pushing/grabbing etc.
- Each clip was coded on a level of aggression and bystander intervention, at 5 sec intervals
- Results showed likelihood of bystander intervention was 19x higher when people displayed targeted aggression = suggests that increases in potential harm motivate bystander interventions
What is a study about accountability in the responsive bystander?
- Ppts are in an online forum and believe they are either in a large group/not (30 OR 1)
- Ppts name appears in same colour or different colour from others, name in different colours increases accountability
- Have opportunity to help someone in distress
- RESULTS: When there were no bystanders and a non-salient name (more accountability) = level of help = higher. Also higher when many bystanders and salient name
- If bystander feels like they are being watched e.g security camera present even if they havent explicitly seen it = more likely to help in the presence of other strangers
What effect does the physical environment have on helping?
- More likely to help e.g leave a bigger tip on a nice day
- More likely to return found money and donate to charity in a clean-scented room
- Looking at small/big town to see if it affects helping, looked at three different helping mechanisms e.g asking for direction, person has hurt leg or donate to charity = size of city impacts levels of helping. Larger city = less helping but direction helping does not decline as much
What is the Urban-overload hypothesis?
People in cities are more likely to keep to themselves to avoid being overloaded by information
What was a study about physical environment and norms?
- Cialdini said descriptive norms (people normally do), injunctive norms (people should do) and norm salience
- Ex given where norm salience says pollution is started by most people, and people began to think it was a normal thing to do instead of improving their behaviour
- STUDY: had an environment that is dirty/clean e.g leaflets on window shield being thrown on ground or in bins. Also see a confed who walks past you or litters (reinforce dirty norm that it is normal to put leaflet on ground)
- PREDICTED: When model litters, and env is dirty = most likely to litter. When model litters and env is clean = least likely to litter
- ACTUAL: when env = dirty & model litters = high % of ppts that litter. When model does not litter in dirty env = still high level of littering. However, clean env = much less littering but if model litters, slight increase to littering
What were studies describing salient cues?
1) Primed with superheroes or control
- Asked to imagine helping situation
- Prime increased helping behaviour relative to control = led to future volunteering and effect is sustained over time
2) Ppts use virtual reality to pretend they are superman/flying helicopter, when finished, experimenter drops pens
- Time taken to help was longer for helicopter and picked less pens up, when superman = less time taken to help and more pens picked up
Study to measure pro-social values?
- Asked ppts to answer what it would be like to have a child and what they would look/act like vs baseline
- Asked to rate the importance of values in Schwartz’s Value Theory
- Found that if they had thought about a child = had more prosocial motivation and rated values higher
- EXP: thinking about child or not child vs child and baseline = smaller effect when child/non-child, higher effect with baseline. Both have effects - like a meta-analysis.
- Task did not depend on whether they enjoyed the task, contact with children or age/gender/parental status
