Prosocial behaviour Flashcards
Prosocial behaviour
A voluntary social behavior that benefit[s] other people or society as a whole, such as helping, sharing, donating, cooperating, and volunteering
Altruism
A special form of helping behaviour, sometimes costly, that shows concern for fellow human beings and is performed without expectations of personal gain
Two explanations of cooperate behaviour in animals and humans
- Mutualism - cooperation benefits the cooperator as well as others
- Kin selection - those who cooperate are biased towards blood relatives because it helps to propagate their own genes
Empathy
The ability to feel another person´s experiences, identifying with and experiencing another person´s emotions, thoughts and attitudes
perspective taking
Being able to see the world through other´s eyes
- -> Imagining how another feels: produces empathy
- -> true altruism
- ->Imagining how you would feel: produces empathy and self-oriented distress
- -> altruism and egoism
Bystander Calculus model
Piliavin
In attending to an emergency, the bystander calculates the perceived costs and benefits of providing help compared with those associated with not helping
- -> mixture of cognitive and psychological process
1. psychological arousal by another´s distress
2. Labelling that arousal as emotion
3. evaluating the consequences of helping and not helping
How to learn to be helpful?
- Giving instructions - telling a child to be helpful (important: consistency)
- Reinforcement - rewarding acts
- Exposure to models
Negative state relive model
Cialdini
Hurting another person/seeing this happen causes bystander to experience negative affect state, tries to get rid of it by showing helping behaviour
–> hedonistic motive instead of altruistic
Bystander effect
People are less likely to help when they´re with others than when alone
–> the greater the number the less likely it is that anyone will help
Cognitive model for helping behaviour
Lanaté and Darley
- Attending to what happened
- defining event as emergency
- assuming responsibility
- deciding what can be done
- -> helping behaviour
Diffusion of responsibility
Tendency of an individual to assume that others will take responsibility (as a result, no one does)
Audience inhibition
–> fear of social blunders - the dread of acting inappropriately or of making a foolish mistake witnessed by others
Social influence
Process whereby attitudes and behaviour are influenced by the real or implied presence of other people.
Three in one experiment of Lanaté and Darley
□ Participants in rooms with TV Monitors and cameras, expect four conditions:
- see and be seen
- see but not seen
- not see but be seen 4. neither see nor be seen □ emergency created when experimenter leaves participants, participant see experimenter in control room getting electric shock from test instrument
- degree of communication increased -> helping decreased
Reciprocity norm/altruism
You help me I help you
Social responsibility norm
The idea that we should help people who are dependent and in need
2 types of goals involved in the motivation to help
- Instrumental goal - helping as intermediate step to a person´s ultimate self-interest
- Ultimate goals - helping without benefit and unintended side effect –> four motivations
Four motivations of ultimate goals
- Egoism - Helping increases/secures my ego, I want to escape punishment
- Altruism - Acting without benefit
- Collectivism - Contribute to welfare of social group
- Principlism - Acting prosaically because of morals and principles
empathy-alturism hypothesis
Batson
If we feel empathy for someone, this increases the likelihood that we will help this person
higher likelihood of feeling empathy when
- similar
- attractive
- part of the group
- perspective taking
Example Kitty Genovese
Bystander effect
noone did something while she was raped and murdered
Example: the role of modelliing
–> learning how to be mor prosocial
by Bryan and Test
people who passed a scene where someone stopped to help a woman with a flat tire were over 50 percent more likely to stop when coming upon another car with flat tire
