Week 11 helping and harming Flashcards
What is helping
- Prosocial behaviour: behaviour intended to aid someone else
- Help: making it easier for someone to do something by offering services or resources
Altruism
prosocial behaviour without any prospect of personal rewards for the helper
egoism reason for help
behaviour motivated by the desire to obtain personal rewards
* Including positive feelings about having helped
cooperation
two or more people working together toward a common goal that will benefit all involved
why do people help? need
- Helper needs to perceive that the recipient needs help
- This is facilitated by attention and hindered by distraction
- Ambiguity of the situation often makes this unclear
- Often look to others’ reactions as a way to reduce ambiguity
- Latané & Darley (1968) ‘Smoke filled room’
- When alone, 75% of people act; when with two confederates (who don’t act) only 10% of participants act
Why do people help Deservingness
whether the helper believes that the recipient deserves help. Factors that influence perceptions of deservingness include:
o Relational models exchange norms: helping should depend on different things in different relational contexts (e.g. need prioritized in communal sharing, versus reciprocity being prioritized in equality matching – i.e. perceiving that someone only deserves help if they have helped you in the past)
Recipient attributes for help
- Identity of recipient Ingroup vs outgroup
- Identifiability of recipient
- Identifiable victim effect: tendency to offer greater help to specific, identifiable victims than to anonymous, statistical victims
- Small, Loewenstein & Slovic (2007)
why do people help: attribution of recepiant responsibility
has the person in need ‘brought it on themselves’
Helper attributes
individual helper differences such as:
o Agreeablenes
* Accessibility of prosocial thoughts Greitemeyer & Osswald (2010)
* Play prosocial or neutral video game (lemming vs tetrist)
* Report prosocial thoughts
* Reseracher knock down a bunch of pencil, measure the amount of pencil picked up
Situational and social factors: Do I need to help
The role of others: there can be social inhibition of helping (known as the bystander effect)(Darley & Latané, 1968)
* Participants believe they are participating in a discussion about college life (via intercom)
* With 1 other, 2 other or 5 other people
* Hear a group member have a ‘seizure’
* Presence of (more) bystanders decreases likelihood of an individual helping
* Diffusion of responsibility: presence of others diminishes each individual’s feeling of responsibility for action
Situational and social factors: is help expected
o Norms of privacy: there is a norm that you should mind your own business.
-For example, Shotland & Straw (1976) found that when passers-by believed there is an interaction between a man and his wife (as opposed to between two strangers), they are far less likely to intervene to help. This is because there is an expectation of a norm of privacy between a married couple. 19% vs 65%
Situational and social factors: Whether one has the time to help
o Darley & Batson (1973) found that whether participants were giving a talk on ‘jobs’ or ‘being a good Samaritan’ didn’t matter to whether they rendered assistance to a person clearly in need – what only mattered was how much time they felt they had (63% of people stopped to help in the control
condition, 45% of people helped in the intermediate time condition, and only 10% of people helped in the hurry condition).
Why do we help others?
® Helping others feels good: the warm glow of giving (Dunn et al., 2008). Dunn found that spending money on others makes one happier than spending on the self.
® From an egoistic perspective: we help to make ourselves feel better and to relieve negative states.
The egoist
- If helping is about making myself feel better, I should help more when I’m feeling bad (in order to relieve negative states)
- Negative-state relief model (Schaller & Cialdini, 1988)
- Most people don’t like watching others suffer, Helping is aimed at reducing this aversive state
Evidence for egoism
- Cialdini, Darby & Vincent (1973)
- Induce negative state . Causing or witnessing suffering
- Remove negative state (i.e., relief) or not E.g., by praise, financial incentive
- Offer chance to help another person
- Helping was greater in people who experienced a negative state which was not removed prior to helping opportunity
- Harris et al. (1971)
- Solicit donations pre or post confession
- Pre > post
The altruist pathway
From an altruistic perspective: because we really care about relieving the suffering of others.
o The empathy-altruism model (Batson et al., 1981) suggests that we can help regardless of whether we have other means of reducing our aversive state (showing empathetic concern - compassion, concern and warmth) – known as ALTRUISTIC helping.
o Batson et al. (1981) found that those who feel empathy help regardless of whether there is an easy alternative way of reducing aversive states (via escape).
Batson alturist learning
- Participants watch Elaine the learner being shock in a study
- Empathy vs not (making her similar to the participant or not)
- Escape: easy vs. difficult (short and long experiment)
-help by taking elaine place
-empathy override ease of escape - when they could not escape, they are more likely to help vs can help
How to increase helping
® Reduce ambiguity (in the situation).
® Teach and activate prosocial norms (teach norms that encourage helping – e.g. to intervene even in a private affair).
® Infuse (rather than diffuse) responsibility – reversing the bystander effect by making it people’s responsibility to help.
® Promote identification with those who need help (drawing on the identifiable victim effect)
Receiving help: type of help
o Dependency-oriented help provides one with a full solution (but limited knowledge/tools for future problem solving) (e.g. catching a fish for someone).
o Autonomy-related help enables one to independently solve problems (e.g. teaching one to fish so they can do it on their own).
-Generally, recipients prefer autonomy-related help
Alvarez & Van Leeuwen (2011) on type of help and their effect
-found that participants preferred to receive autonomy-oriented help regardless of whether it came from a peer or from an expert (feeling more positive about receiving the help, feeling more empowered, feeling more respected and more competent).
- However, participants’ reactions to the helper (respect for the helper, trust in the helper, anger towards the helper) were less favourable when peers offered autonomy-oriented help (compared to dependency-oriented help). When experts were helping however, feelings towards the helper were still more favourable when autonomy-related help was provided
What is aggression
- Aggression: behaviour intended to harm someone else
- Instrumental aggression: aggression used as a means to an end
- Hostile aggression: aggression driven by anger (at insult, disrespect, or threats to identity/esteem)
Who aggresses more
- Men more than women (but there are complexities here)
- Aggressive cultures (culture have norm that would behave aggressively under condition)
Cultures of honour (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996) - Men should be tough, loyal and ready to fight
- Respond to insult and threat of material loss with aggression
- Enforce one’s rights and protect family, home and possessions
- Such reputations serve as deterrents
- Especially likely in places in which institutions (e.g., police, government) don’t do this very well
Cultures of honour in US
- Southern United States and Honour culture Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle & Schwarz (1996)
- Insult and aggression in the culture of honor
-found that participants were more likely to respond to an insult (a staged bump) with anger (compared to amusement) if they were from Southern USA versus Northern USA.
-Furthermore, after being insulted Southern participants were far more likely to display non-verbal aggression (giving way to the confederate from a far closer distance, encroaching on their personal space, as well as shaking the confederates hand far more strongly)
Frustration-aggression hypothesis
Frustration follows the blocking of a certain goal.
® This hypothesis (Dollard et al., 1939) suggests that frustration inevitably triggers aggression.
® This hypothesis was later refined by Berkowitz (1989), who suggested that it is not the goal blockage per se, but the negative feelings/arousal (e.g. anger, irritation) that arise from this goal blockage that triggers aggression
Cues to aggression: enviroment
- Aspects of the environment linked to aggression can activate thoughts of aggression.
o Anderson, Benjamin & Bartholow (1998) found that seeing a priming stimulus such as the word ‘gun’ can trigger aggressive thoughts. This suggests that mere exposure to a word can activate aggressive-like thoughts
Cues to aggression: social learning
o Exposure to violent role models increases aggression.
o Playing violent video games can increase aggression. For example, Anderson & Dill (2000) found that exposure to violent video games increases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts, which accounts for the effect of video gameplay on aggressive behaviour
Cues to aggression: superficial and deep processing
- Initial, automatic aggressive tendencies can be overcome by deeper processing
- Factors that impair deep processing increase likelihood of aggressive impulses being realized in aggressive behaviour – these include high physiological arousal, time pressure and alcohol.
General Aggression Model
-personality trait and situation variable leads to change in internal process
-change in internal process affect appraisal and decision process
-leads to behaviour (aggression)
Dealing with aggression: what doesn’t work
® Catharsis/venting. The theory behind this is that anger builds up like steam and needs release/ purging/ cleansing, and expressing negative affect and aggressive tendencies (e.g. punching a boxing bag) purges one of their aggressive impulses. However, this is not true
experiment to show catharsis doesnt work
- Receive negative feedback from another ‘participant’: worse essay ever written
- Hit punching bag or not
- Those who hit punching bag: rumination (think about being insult) or distraction (think about smt else)
- So three conditions: control vs vent/rumination vs vent/distraction
-low aggression order: control, distraction , rumination
Dealing with aggression: what works
- Promoting norms of non-aggression (changing role models)
- Minimizing cues (undermining cues)
- Cognitive re-appraisal (think about situation differently)
- Increase empathy
Cognitive re-appraisle in depth
-involves thinking about the situation that prompted your anger in a different way (interpreting the situation in a different way).
-One particular way of doing so is via self-distancing (Mischkowski et al., 2012), where participants examine the provocation from a third-person perspective. Mischkowski found that self-distancing decreases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts (‘implicit aggressive cognition’) (versus both self-immersion and the control), as well as decreasing overall anger
Aggression minimizing strategies
– involve decreasing the accessibility of aggressive conditions, decreasing arousal, and decreasing negative affect.
-Bushman suggests that targeting one’s present internal state (via delay, distraction, relaxation and promotion of incompatible responses (prosocial cognitions) will be most likely to decrease aggression
