Prosocial Behaviour: Acting for the Greater Good

Prosocial behaviour: Acting for the greater good

• prosocial behaviour- intention to help and benefit the other person i.e. charity, donating.
• helping behaviour, benefit other individuals; tend to feel good about ourselves.
• Altruistic behaviour completely selfless act to benefit the other person.
• why do people help? different motivational forces to explain why people help; why is it helpful to help other individuals, learning to be helpful, social norms of empathy and arousal.
• Evolutionary perspective: in terms of genetic factors i.e. enhance reproductive success, likely to be inherited, survival of one’s genes in subsequent generations
• Reciprocal altruism: helping benefits self and other. Helping in the future, help survival- pass genes fr one to another. We tend to help people who also helps us
• increase status and reputation of the community. Higher status with greater desirability of mating partner and increase status and reputation in community
• does explain why organisms help people that are not related to them
• Kin selection: we are helping others to preserve individuals genes; more likely to help relatives to ensure our genes pass on.
• Organisms and species- help healthy relatives, pass genes
• Learning to be helpful in a social environment. Parents advise children helping is a good thing and the benefits of helping. Social psychologist- through modelling and observational learning, in the same way, prosaically and help other individual needs, reward…powerful influence in later behaviour.
• Instrumental- prosocial acts more likely to be repeated in the future
• Social norm- what is normal and appropriate and how we should act. Social reward- viewing us positively.
• Reciprocity principle- return favor, help the ones who has helped us
• Social responsibility: one who are in need regardless of whether they have helped us in the past or in the future
• Just-world hypothesis- get what they deserve, good people- good things, bad people- bad things.
• empathy and arousal: how emotion can guide future behaviour. Empathise an individual, feel another person’s experience. When we experience distressing event, elevate and give rise of empathy. Fundamental to helping (empathetic arousal)- if we experience someone in distress, do we help in order for self, or true altruism…primarily concern about the other person.
• Altruism hypothesis: altruistic, reduce another person’s distress, we are going to help but can be classified as egoistic. If you witness someone suffering, you can experience emotional arousal; personal distress or empathetic concern (feelings of compassions towards the other person in need)
• If we witness, more likely empathetic concern. We are going to help but our motives are altruistic. If we focus on the wrong feelings, then our motives can be quite egoistic to reduce our own distress
• Egoistic- they can escape the situation but if the motives is altruistic, an altruist will stay and help.
• different theoretical to why people will help in all aspects.
• When do people help and not to?
• Genovese case
• bystander effect: occurs when people are less likely to help in emergency situation when they are with people not themselves. Less likely to intervene when someone is in need
• Latin and Darley’s cognitive model + Piliavin’s bystander calculus model
• Latin and Darley: bystander can decided not to help. When incident happens, notice out of the ordinary happened. Do we interpret the incident of emergency (social influence)? Important to interpret the situation, social influence, ambiguous situation…tend to look at other people, behave in the situation
• Social influence- if nobody seems to worried, in fact, it is an emergency, what to do, how to act.
• If we interpret as not an emergency, the next thing is accept personal responsibility…who’s responsibility to help the person in need.
• As the no. of bystander increases, intervenes and help in the situation. If you’re in a large crowd, diffusion of responsibility. Diffusion takes place, place responsibility of someone’s else in the crowd.
• Notice- interpret- accept- decide. Before we act, set of confidence, helped and benefited the other in need
• presence of other people, not confident handling the situation- not helping appropriately, which stops us intervening
• Piliavin (1981)- cross benefit analysis whether to help in the situation. Bystander- Calculus Model- try to understand why physiological arousal, labelling emotional response and calculating the cost of helping/ not helping- in order to see whether help is needed. i.e elevated heart rate: more likely to help
• we do experience arousal in a no. of context. A fight with somebody, experience physiological arousal. We can attribute arousal to personal distress after experiencing suffer, is to help another individual. Empathic concern (other interest)- sympathy and empathy- victim identified in terms of attributes, increase in empathic concern
• Having identified their experience arousal, the bystander choose their own personal distress at the lowest cost…cost benefit analysis comes in, requires time and effort. There are cost of not helping i.e. personal, if we don’t help, we may experience self blame…we might feel guilty…there are empathy cost. If bystander feels empathic concern and fails to help, they are more likely to have negative emotions. Bystander reduces the cost of not helping, other people are available, someone will help in the situation…if someone is responsible, wont feel guilty, self blame
• Cost of helping and not: if cost of helping is low, bystander intervenes indirectly. If the cost of helping is low, then bystander will respond and guided by the personal norm. Bystander more likely and ensure the teenager is ok with the situation. If the cost of helping is high as well as not helping, bystander more indirectly to help. They might lower cost of not helping, actually this is not emergency….
• bystander completely ignore the victim when cost of helping quite high, no severe symptoms
• Person factors: confidence placed quite an important role, more likely to help someone in need, high sense of social responsibility.
• Good mood, more likely to help, less preoccupied and more sensitive to needs of other people. Bad mood less likely to help except if they feel guilty.
• Gender differences on prosocial and antisocial behaviour. Men more likely to help than women; high risk, dangerous…while women more likely to help in every day situation
• empathy altruism hypothesis: shown to be quite important but sustaining…donating, volunteering…dispositional empathy is key
• Who is more likely to be helped in a situation:
• recipient centred determinants of helping: in need, quite similar in attributes, similar age to us. If we can identify and help in group member…
• Some research- physical attractiveness and personality influences prosocial behaviour who comes across quite friendly and nice
• responsibility: more likely to help if that person is suffering but not their fault. They will intervene and help in particular situation, why people help….

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