Prosocial Behaviour Flashcards
Prosocial Behaviour
Prosocial Behaviour is a broad category of acts that are valued positively by society, which
therefore contrasts with antisocial or aggressive behaviour. Such behaviour has positive social
consequences and contributes to the physical or psychological well-being of another person. Being
prosocial includes both being helpful and altruistic. It also embraces acts of cooperation, friendship,
sacrifice, sharing, sympathy and trust. What is considered prosocial is defined by a society’s norms.
Helping Behaviour AND Altrusim
Helping Behaviour is a subcategory of prosocial behaviour. It is intentional and benefits another
living being or group. Altruism is another subcategory of prosocial behaviour, and refers to an act
that is meant to benefit another rather than oneself. In this respect, Batson (1991) proposed that true
altruism is selfless. But how can we be sure that an act does not stem from some ulterior motive,
such as ingratiation? There are sometimes internal rewards associated with acting prosocially, such
as feeling good or appearing virtuous. Thus, one question concerns how magnanimous human nature
really is. Indeed, prosocial behaviour is difficult to explain using traditional theories of human
behaviour. Probably the majority of psychologists, and philosophers before them, have
conceptualised human behaviour as egoistic. Everything we do should ultimately benefit ourselves
and would be self-interested. The question of why people help others is obviously an important one.
Biological Position
The Biological Position is that, just as humans have innate tendencies to eat and drink, so they have
innate tendencies to be connected to others and to help them. If true, it could be a reason why human
beings have been so successful in an evolutionary sense. Indeed, the question whether altruism is a
trait that has evolutionary survival value has been asked by social psychologists, sociobiologists, and
evolutionary social psychologists. Recall from Lecture 1 that Dunbar proposes that a major function
of the large brain of humans and other primates is to facilitate social contact, including the use of
language to convey information about other people’s character. Thus, humans are keenly aware of
whether somebody might be trustworthy and therefore a good cooperative partner, or not.
Kin Selection
One consideration in this context has been whether people only help those that are related to them
(i.e., share their genes). According to Kin Selection a cooperator is biased towards blood relatives
because it helps propagate one’s own genes. However, although there is some evidence that people
preferentially help those who are related to them, this by far does not account for so many other
instances of helping toward unrelated individuals. Thus, few social psychologists accept an
exclusively evolutionary explanation of human prosocial behaviours.
Emergencies(Bystander effect)
Much research has investigated in particular how helping occurs in emergency situations, which
contain elements of threat of harm, or actual harm. Such instances are unusual and typically rare, and
importantly, there are no specific characteristics that make an emergency easily identifiable. As
noted further below, this ambiguity poses a fundamental problem. Emergencies are by definition
unforeseen and they require immediate action so that leisurely consideration of options is not
feasible. In this context, consider a similarity between the nature of an emergency and the autokinetic
paradigm used by Sherif to study the development of social norms, as discussed in Lecture 3. Both
involve uncertainty, ambiguity and a lack of structure as a basis for judgement or action. In both
cases, we are therefore likely to look to others for guidance on how to think and act.
Social psychological research into helping behaviour in emergencies began in the late 1950s. One
single event that has often been credited with providing a major impetus to this research is the
murder of a young woman called Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964. Initial reports noted that 38
people were aware of the repeated knife attack on the young woman, but they failed to act (note that
more recent report suggest that it might have been “only” 12 witnesses). The news of her murder
appalled New York residents, and overall led to serious consideration as to why such a crime could
have happened in the presence of other people. Although a recent analysis showed that there were
additional complexities to the Genovese case (Kassin, 2017), overall it sparked interest in
investigating the Bystander Effect.
Bystander Effect. -Latane and Darley (1970)
Smoke in the room
In one of the early studies testing this phenomenon Latane and Darley (1970) invited male students
to an interview room to discuss some of the problems involved in life at a large university. While the
students were completing a preliminary questionnaire, smoke began to pour in from a wall vent. This
continued for six minutes until the room was full of smoke. Participants were either alone, with two
other participants they did not know, or with two confederates who completely ignored the smoke.
What would the participants do, and how long would they take to do it? The researchers wondered if
people in such situations look to others as a guide. This is exactly what happened. Participants who
were alone were more likely to report the smoke than were those with other strangers. While 75% of
the participants who were alone took positive action, only 38% of the two-stranger groups
intervened. Participants in the presence of two passive confederates were even less likely to report
the situation, taking action only 10% of the time. Thus, Latane and Darley suggested that the
presence of others can inhibit people from responding: the more people, the slower the response.
They furthermore reasoned that the apparent lack of concern shown by the witnesses in the Genovese
case could conceal other processes. An early finding was that failure to help occurred more often
when the size of the group of witnesses increased. Latane and Darley’s cognitive model of bystander
intervention proposes that whether a person helps depends on the outcomes of a series of sequential
decisions. At any point along this path, a decision could be made that would terminate helping
behaviour because various obstacles can get in the way. In particular, three factors can be identified:
Pluralistic Ignorance- Obstable I leads to bystander effect
Pluralistic Ignorance is the general phenomenon where people in a group misperceive the beliefs of
others because everyone in the group is acting inconsistently with their beliefs, as we already
discussed in Lecture 1. In the context of helping it is the tendency not to respond to a potentially
dangerous situation because of a collective uncertainty about what is happening that is reinforced by
the fact that no one else seems concerned or is responding. This is often the result of there being
ambiguity regarding whether a certain situation really does qualify as an emergency.
Diffusion of responsibility-Obstable II leads to bystander effect
Diffusion of responsibility describes the fact that in social situations a person who is part of a group
often tends to offload responsibility for action to others. In the case of an emergency, the presence of
other onlookers provides the opportunity to transfer the responsibility for acting, or not acting, on to
them. It is necessary only that they be available, somewhere, for action. People who are alone are
most likely to help a victim because they believe they carry the entire responsibility for action. They
know that if they do not act, nobody else will.
Audience Inhibition (also called Evaluation Apprehension)-Obstacle III leads to bystander effect
Audience Inhibition (also called Evaluation Apprehension) refers to the problem that other
onlookers can make a potential helper feel self-conscious about an intended action because people do
not want to appear foolish by overreacting. In the context of prosocial behaviour, this process is
sometimes referred to as a fear of social blunders. This concern relates to people’s general desire to
be seen competent and likeable to others, and therefore their perceptions of the social world can be
coloured by self-relevant concerns.
Bystander-Calculus Model Piliavin (1981)
A different model of helping was proposed by Piliavin (1981). The Bystander-Calculus Model
involves a mixture of physiological processes and cognitive processes. The basic idea is that people
intervene in an emergency because they find it unpleasantly anxiety-provoking and arousing so they
seek relief.
When we think someone is in trouble we work our way through three stages (i.e.,
calculations) before we respond.
First, we are physiologically agitated and aroused by another
person’s distress.
Second, we label this arousal as an emotion.
Third, we evaluate the consequences of helping.
Interestingly, not helping can also involve costs. Piliavin distinguished between empathy
costs of not helping and personal costs of not helping. A critical intervening variable is the
relationship between the bystander and the victim: Empathic concern is one motive for helping a
distressed person; conversely, not helping when you feel empathic concern results in empathy costs
(e.g. anxiety) in response to the other’s plight. Thus the clarity of the emergency, its severity and the
closeness of the bystander to the victim will increase the costs of not helping.
Personal costs of not helping
Personal costs of not helping are many and varied, such as public censure or self-blame. Certain
characteristics of the person in distress also affect the costs of not helping: for instance, the greater
the victim’s need for help, the greater the costs of not helping. If you believe that a victim might die
if you do not help, the personal costs are likely to be high. If a beggar in the street asked you for
money to buy alcohol, the personal costs of refusing might not be high; but if the request was for
money for food or medicine, the costs might be quite high.
Bystander-calculus model regaring to Genovese case
With regard to the Genovese case, the bystander-calculus model suggests that, although the
onlookers would have been aroused and felt personal distress and empathic concern, the empathy
costs and personal costs were not sufficient. Personal costs, in particular, may have deterred people
from intervening. What if they got killed? The costs of not helping could be either high or low,
depending on how people interpreted the situation: for example, was it just a marital dispute? The
impact of this approach is that situational influences are heavily involved when people decide
whether to help in an emergency. Overall the model suggests that there is a cost-benefit analysis
according to which a person will act, and for which the underlying mechanism is not really altruistic
as such and perhaps more motivated by self-interest.
Batson on altruistic
Batson, however, has argued that an act is truly altruistic only if people seek to help even when they
will no longer be troubled by observing the suffering of another person. This approach offers a
different perspective to the Genovese case, with the bystanders feeling disturbed, but not sufficiently
so to act: perhaps they could not identify with the victim, in other words, they were not experiencing
a sufficient level of empathy.
Batson (1981) tested the idea that when people experience a high level of empathy they are willing to
help even in situations that give them the option of an “easy escape.” The study involved different
conditions that differentiated whether the participant was similar or dissimilar to the target that was
meant to receive electric shocks, therefore eliciting high or low levels of empathy. In addition, it was
varied whether the participant would continue to be exposed to the person suffering through the
shocks (=difficult escape) or not (=easy escape). In the high empathy condition people agreed to
accept the shocks in the place of the target person regardless of whether there was an escape
opportunity or not. In contrast, those in the low empathy condition only helped when they had no
way out, that is, when they were confronted with having to watch the target go through the painful
shocks. Subsequent research by Cialdini, however, suggested that these effects change once
participants are induced to experience positive mood, and in this case helping in the high empathy
condition only persisted when there was no escape available, suggesting that when people feel good
on some level they are less motivated to help even when their empathic concern might be high.
Just-World Hypothesis
If we are wondering if we should offer help to someone in need we usually try to figure out who or what this person might be. Some observers may even blame an innoncent victim. According to the Just World Hypothesis propsed by Lerner and Miller, people need to believe-perhaps for their own security- that the world is a just place where people get what they deserve. For instance, someone who has an accident may have deserved it. Therefore, if some victims deserve their fate, we can think good, they had that coming to them. and not hlp them. Some witnesses in the Kitty Genovese case may have believed that it washer fault for being out so late- a familar response to mant crimes. Tale another example : perhaps a rape victim ‘deserved’ what happended because her clothing was too tight or revealing? Fortunately, most of us respond to evidence that suffering is underserved. Accepting this undermines the power of belief in a just world and allows justice to be done. A necessary precondition of actuallu helping is to believe that the help will be effective.
Recent research has looked at helping behaviour while taking into account moral emotions, and in particular, of moral elevation, which involves the feeling of being inspired, uplifted and motivated when observing another person engaeg in exceptionally moral behaviour. When exposed to such moral exemplars participnats often express a dsire to ‘become a better person’ Research indeed suggests that after having watched a film clip of an inspiring mentor participants were more likely to. They were also more likely to assist the experimenter by compleing a high number of tedious and boring match qurstionnaires.
This suggest that exposure to a moral role model can inspire people to enage in prosocial behaviour as well, and to do so in acompletely unrelated domain, rather than just mimicking the specific behaviour on display. Further research shows that asking participnats to engage in a self-affirmatio task that was meant to boost their self-esteem did not eliminate the helping effect, and instead, made it more pronounced in participants who had indicated enforsing prosocial values. Thus, this helping effect cannot be explained by people simply wanting to feel better about themselves because they feel threatened when confronted with another perosn’s exceptional moral achievements. One possibility is that moral elevation is effectibe bacause it provides a powerful mechanism to transmit social norms within groups by demonsttrating moral virtue that are desirable for group member. and to which others therefore inspire.
