Lecture_09_Prosocial Behaviors Flashcards
Prosocial Behavior
Any act performed with the GOAL OF BENEFITTING another person
- Depends on the goal, not the effect (Based on intention)
- The individual benefitting from prosocial behavior is not part of the definition: Helping an individual who does not want to be helped
Altruism
- Helping purely out of the desire to benefit someone else
- With no benefit (and often a cost) to oneself
- The key is motivation to help
Semantic Confusion about Altruism
- If a person is rewarded
- When others are around
Reciprocity
Exchanges with others for mutual benefit
- Exchange the same thing
- Exchange the different things
Individuals or groups help each other in the same way
A chimpanzee grooms a second chimpanzee, and the second chimpanzee grooms the first
One thing can be exchanged for a
different thing
I help you move to a new apartment and later you help me with my work
- More common among humans
- Training monkey to use tokens
3 Motives for Prosocial Behavior
- Evolutionary Psychology
- Social Exchange Theory
- Empathy and Altruism
Evolutionary Psychology
The application of the principles of evolutionary biology to the field of psychology
- A meta-theory, or perspective
- Some cognitive mechanisms and behaviors are adaptations
Adaptation
Products of natural selection that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce
Natural Selection
Mutations -> to changes in the structure of an organism -> affect behavior and cognition
Levels of Analysis in Altruism
- Ultimate/distal causation
- Proximate causation
Ultimate/distal causation
WHY
Evolutionary forces acting on mind and behavior
- Kin selection
- Reciprocal altruism
- Costly signaling
Proximate causation
HOW
Immediate causes such as situations and physiology
Empathy-altruism hypothesis, social exchange theory
A Confusion Between Levels of How Natural Selection can Explain Altruism
- Ultimate causation: Altruism is an evolved mechanism that helps unrelated individuals survive and reproduce at the cost of our own ability to survive and reproduce, then altruism cannot exist
- Proximate causation: But people can still be altruistic in other ways.
- Their culture or religion can drive them to sacrifice.
- People can genuinely intend to help in situations where that help is unlikely to benefit them
Kin Selection
Inclusive fitness theory
- Organisms can spread their genes by helping genetic relatives with whom they share genes
- Favor altruistic acts directed toward genetic relatives
Criticism of Kin Selection
We can’t perceive whether others are related to us
- Proximate level: people they have known for many years, look like people who they have known, familiar
Reciprocal Altruism
- Natural selection can favor behaviors where an organism temporarily hurts its ability to survive and reproduce by helping another organism
- For this to happen, the second organism needs to be more likely to help the first organism in the future
2 Conditions for Reciprocal Altruism
- A way to detect cheaters who receive help but do not return the favor
- Many interactions between the organisms so that cheating is not an effective strategy
Reciprocal Altruism in Animals
- Vampire bats feed unrelated vampire bats who are then more likely to feed them back in the future
- Cleaner fish are small fish that eat dead skin and parasites from the mouths of larger fish
- The cleaning helps the larger fish, which does not swallow the cleaner fish and protects it from predators
Is reciprocal altruism an example of altruism?
Yes
- Reciprocal altruism does not require for the helper to be consciously aware that they expect the favor to be returned
- People with minds shaped by reciprocal altruism may still just help others out of the goodness of their hearts:
Punishment for Fail Reciprocity
- Loss of relationships and future help
- Gossip that damages their reputations and relationships
Costly Signaling
Organisms often want to signal their desirable characteristics to others
- Only individuals possessing the desirable characteristic can afford to communicate it
- When we help others, we show that we:
1) have resources that we can afford to give others
2) are willing to sacrifice these resources to help others
3) value our place in our group and our relationship with people in the group
Evidence suggesting that prosocial behavior is a costly signal
- Donating money when observed by others -> improve a person’s reputation
- The presence of others increases altruism, generosity, and cooperation
- When people are more visible and less anonymous, they cooperate more with other people
Social Exchange Theory
prosocial behavior, is shaped by our desire to maximize rewards while minimizing our costs
The Benefits of Prosocial Behavior
Rewarding
- Increasing the likelihood that the person we helped will help us in the future
- Reducing the distress we feel when we see others suffer
- Increasing others’ approval of us (increasing our reputation)
- Enhancing feelings of self-worth
- People experience negative feelings when others suffer and help,
at least in part, to make themselves feel better (Contradict to empathy)
The Costs of Prosocial Behavior
The benefits of prosocial behavior are weighed against costs
- Helping decreases when its costs are high
1) physical danger
2) pain
3) embarrassment
4) time and energy spent helping
Criticism of Social Exchange Theory on Altruism
Benefits > costs
-> Altruism does not exist
-> Prosocial behavior
The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
Human beings can help for selfish as well as selfless (altruistic) reasons.
- Feel empathy -> help without thinking of benefits
- Do not empathize -> weigh the costs and benefits (social exchange theory)
Batson argues that empathic prosocial behavior is pure and altruistic
Empathy
Sharing another person’s feelings by imagining oneself in that person’s situation.
Criticism of the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
- Sharing their suffering means that the helper would be relieving their own unpleasant emotions by helping the other person.
- When people strongly identify with others, the other person feels like an extension of oneself.
- Helping the other person becomes more like helping oneself.
Carol Macy Study
Empathy x Cost Conditions -> Helping
- Low empathy + high cost -> help the least
- Suggesting that Social Exchange Theory happens in low empathy
- Explanation: reduces empathetic suffering, feel better, and rewarding
Altruism debate is really about semantics
How we define altruism and self-interest
- If altruism is defined loosely enough to include any kind of benefit for a helper regardless of the helper’s conscious intentions, then altruism cannot exist
- If self-interest is defined broadly to include the positive feelings people enjoy after helping and the relief people feel when others are suffering less, then all prosocial behavior is at least a little bit selfish
Practice question: According to Toei and Batson, participants overlooked the costs of helping when they empathized with Carol Macy. Imagine we further increased the costs of helping Carol Macy by saying that the participant will have to drive two hours to Carol’s house in order to help her.
- Do you think participants in the high empathy condition would still help Carol Macy regardless of the cost of helping?
No. Because the cost of helping might outweigh the benefits of reducing second hand suffering from empathy
Practice question: What is the difference between reciprocal altruism and social exchange theory
different level of analysis
- Reciprocal altruism: survivalibility of species
Situational factors influencing prosocial behavior (When)
- Rural vs urban environment
- Residential mobility
- Number of bystanders
Urban vs Rural Environments
People in small towns are also more likely to help
- Small, interdependent communities internalize more altruistic values
- Urban overload hypothesis: In cities, people are constantly bombarded with stimuli
Residential Mobility
- The frequency with which people move their household from one location to another
- Living in one place ->
- Attached to their community,
- Interdependent with their neighbors
- Concerned about their reputation in their community
- Urban people also have accessibility to resource -> more individualistic
- Rural have to depend on others -> more collective
The Number of Bystanders (Bystander Effect)
The likelihood that any one person helps decreases with the number of bystanders
5 Steps for deciding whether or not to intervene in an emergency
- Noticing the event
- Interpreting the event as an
emergency - Assuming responsibility
- Knowing how to help
- Deciding to implement help
- Why might people not notice an emergency?
Busy or distracted
- Interpreting the event as an
emergency
- When an event is clearly an emergency, the number of
bystanders matters less - Ambiguity as a result of Informational social influence: people look to others to define reality
- Pluralistic ignorance: mistakenly assumed that others knew more than they did
- Assuming responsibility
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Avoid the costs of helping
- Don’t know if someone has
helped
- Knowing how to help
- People who do not know how to help could embarrass themselves or make the situation worse
- In many situations, people do not need expert knowledge to help
- If a person seems to be having a medical emergency, a person who is not a doctor can still try to contact someone who can help
- Deciding to implement help
Why people don’t help even they know how?
- Not qualified: Do heimlich
- Afraid of:
* looking stupid
* making the situation worse
* endangering themselves
- Consider costs of helping
Practice questions: We talked about two explanations for why people from rural areas help more than people in urban areas: residential mobility and urban overload. Can you think of another reason?
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Reputation
Practice questions: What is the bystander effect?
The likelihood that any one person helps decreases with the number of bystanders
Practice questions: What is pluralistic ignorance?
Making incorrect assumption about others
Practice questions: How is pluralistic ignorance related to informational social influence?
Informational social influence cause pluralistic ignorance
