Social Psychology

1. HELPING OTHERS AND
PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
FATHIMA THABSHEERA
IIND SEM

2. Prosocial behavior
Actions by individuals that help others
with no immediate benefit to the helper.

3. Evolutionary Factors in Helping
The “Selfish Gene”
• emphasize the survival of the individuals’ genes not survival of
fittest
• KIN SELECTION :
• Tendency of an individual to help genetic relatives
• In fact, kin selection is evident in the behavior of many
organisms.

4. • Reciprocal Altruism Kin selection provides only a partial
explanation for helping.
• Relatives are not always helpful to each other. And even though
relatives may get preferential treatment, most people help out
non-kin as well.
• Through reciprocal altruism, helping someone else can be in
your best interests because it increases the likelihood that you
will be helped in return

5. • Robert Trivers (1971) cited several examples of reciprocal altruism
in animals.
• In some human environments, reciprocal altruism is essential for
survival even today.

6. The Evolution of Empathy
 critically important role that empathy plays in helping.
 Most researchers regard empathy as having both a cognitive component of
understanding the emotional experience of another individual and an
emotional experience that is consistent with what the other is feeling
 A major cognitive component of empathy is perspective taking: using the
power of imagination to try to see the world through someone else’s eyes.
A key emotional component of empathy is empathic concern, which
involves other oriented feelings, such as sympathy, compassion, and
tenderness.

7.  Although higher-order cognitive aspects of empathy are specific to humans,
other animals show evidence of empathy in a variety of ways.
 Paul MacLean (1985) proposed that empathy emerged with the evolutionary
transition from reptiles to mammals.
 An important characteristic of mammals related to empathy is how much
the young must be nurtured by the mother or parents.
 Caregivers must understand the emotional communications from their
young and respond to its emotional needs.
 Many scholars propose that once the capacity for empathy was established,
it evolved beyond the parent–child relationship
 Very young human infants show signs of being affected by the distress of
others and, by their first birthday, begin to comfort victims of distress

8.  Two additional details are worth noting about the study. First, the
experimenter never requested help from the infants, nor did he praise or
reward the infants when they did help.
 Second, for every task he needed help with, the experimenter created a
similar situation in which he did not seem to have a problem.
 The researchers also tested three young chimpanzees using a similar
procedure.
 The chimpanzees also helped the human experimenter when they saw that
he appeared to need help reaching his goal, although not across as many
tasks or as reliably as the human infants did.

9.  Neuroscience research supports the idea that the capacity for empathy is
part of our biology. A recent meta-analysis reported a strong body of
evidence indicating that empathy for other’s pain activates neural structures
involved in the direct experience of pain.
 In addition, the hormone oxytocin—which is well known as being involved in
mother–infant attachment as well as in bonding between mating pairs—is
implicated in empathy and prosocial behaviors.
 In fact, humans given a boost of oxytocin (through a nasal spray) in
experiments behaved in more cooperative and trusting ways than did
participants given a placebo

10. Rewards of Helping: Helping Others to Help Oneself
 Whether or not it can be traced to evolutionary and biological factors, one
important reason why people help others is because it often is rewarding,
even if the rewards are psychological rather than material.
 We all like the idea of being the hero, lifted onto the shoulders of our
peers for coming to the rescue of someone in distress.
 Helping helps the helper.
 The potential rewards of helping, however, can be offset with significant
costs.

11.  Indeed, people often seem to conduct a cost–benefit analysis not only when
making deliberate decisions to behave prosocially, as when donating blood,
but also in more impulsive, sudden decisions to intervene in an emergency.
The empirical evidence on this point is clear: People are much more likely to
help when the potential rewards of helping seem high relative to the potential
costs.
 Arousal: cost–reward model: The proposition that people react to emergency
situations by acting in the most cost-effective way to reduce the arousal of
shock and alarm.

12.  The arousal: cost–reward model of helping stipulates that both emotional
and cognitive factors determine whether bystanders to an emergency will
intervene.
 Emotionally, bystanders experience the shock and alarm of personal distress;
this unpleasant state of arousal motivates them to do something to reduce it.
 What they do, however, depends on the “bystander calculus,” their
computation of the costs and rewards associated with helping.
 When potential rewards (to self and victim) outweigh potential costs (to self
and victim), bystanders will help.
 But raise those costs and lower those rewards and it is likely that the victims
will not be helped.

13. Feeling Good
 Helping often simply feels good.
 A growing body of research reveals a strong relationship between giving
help and feeling better, including improvements in mental and physical
health
 Heidi Wayment (2004), for example, found that women who engaged in
helping behaviors in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks in the United States showed greater reduction in their distress over
time than women who did not do so.
 More recently, a longitudinal study by Jane Piliavin and Erica Siegl (2008)
found that doing volunteer work was associated with improvements in
psychological well-being and that volunteering for multiple organizations was
associated with greater improvement.

14. • Even when the costs of helping are high enough that it doesn’t feel good
immediately, it can pay off in the long run.
• When parents reluctantly sacrifice relaxing with a good book or movie at the
end of a hard day in order to help their child finish some homework, they might
not feel immediate joy from giving help, but in the long run, they can expect to
reap the benefits of their behavior.
• In addition, people may feel good not only from their role of helper, but simply
because of what is called empathic joy—the pleasure one has at seeing another
person experience relief.

15. o Children learn that helping others can be rewarding.
o Younger children focus on the rewards they get from parents and others,
but as they develop into adolescents, they begin to reward themselves
for helping, taking pride in their actions.
o Their helpful behavior can then be internally motivated, leading them to
help even without the promise of immediate material or social rewards
o In their negative state relief model, Robert Cialdini and his colleagues
(1987) propose that because of this positive effect of helping, people
who are feeling bad maymbe inclined to help others in order to improve
their mood.
o Indeed, after experiencing a traumatic event, some individuals seek out
opportunities to help others in order to feel better about themselves
instead of becoming bitter and antisocial.

16. Being Good
 In addition to wanting to feel good, many of us also are motivated to be
good—that is, to help because we recognize that “it’s the right thing to do.”
 Some situations are especially likely to call to mind norms that compel
helpful behaviors.

17. The Cost of Helping or of Not Helping
♦ Clearly helping has its rewards, but it has its costs as well.
♦ Other helpers have done more sustained and deliberate helping, such as the
people who helped hide runaway slaves in the nineteenth-century United
States or the people who helped hide Jews during the Holocaust.
♦ Sharon Shepela and others (1999) call this type of thoughtful helping in the
face of potentially enormous costs courageous resistance.
♦ And although giving help is often associated with positive affect and health,
when the help involves constant and exhausting demands, which is often the
case when taking long-term care of a very ill person, the effects on helpers’
physical and mental health—as well as on their financial security—can be
quite negative

18.  To lower some of the costs of helping, some legislatures have created “Good
Samaritan” laws that encourage bystanders to intervene in emergencies by
offering them legal protection, particularly doctors who volunteer medical care
when they happen upon emergencies.
 Other kinds of Good Samaritan laws increase the costs of failing to help.
Sometimes called “duty to rescue” laws, these laws require people to provide
or summon aid in an emergency, so long as they do not endanger themselves
in the process.
 In the United States, this kind of duty to rescue law is relatively rare, but they
are more common in Europe and Canada.

19. Altruism or Egoism: The Great Debate
o Are our helpful behaviors always egoistic— motivated by selfish concerns?
Or are humans ever truly altruistic—motivated by the desire to increase
another’s welfare?
o Many psychological theories assume an egoistic, self-interested bottom
line.
o Daniel Batson thinks not. he believes that the motivation behind some
helpful actions is truly altruistic and that empathy plays a critically
important role in it.

20.  The Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis
 Batson’s model of altruism is based on his view of the consequences of
empathy.
 According to Batson, if you perceive someone in need and imagine how that
person feels, you are likely to experience other-oriented feelings of empathic
concern, which in turn produce the altruistic motive to reduce the other
person’s distress.
 There are, however, instances in which people perceive someone in need and
focus on their own feelings about this person or on how they would feel in that
person’s situation.
 Although many people (and some researchers) may think of this as “empathy,”
Batson contrasts this with instances in which people’s concern is with how the
other person is feeling.
 It’s when your focus is on the other person that true altruism is possible.

22. three distinct components of empathy:
 an emotional aspect (emotional empathy, which involves sharing the feelings
and emotions of others),
 a cognitive component, which involves perceiving others’ thoughts and
feelings accurately (empathic accuracy),
 empathic concern, which involves feelings of concern for another’s well-
being

23. Empathic accuracy
Responding
effectively to
others
Good social
relationships
Good social
adjustment

24. Convergence of Motivations: Volunteering
People tend to engage in more long-term helping behavior, such as volunteerism,
due to multiple motives.
Some of these motives are associated with empathy, such as perspective taking
and empathic concern, whereas other motives are more egoistic, such as wanting
to enhance one’s résumé, relieve negative emotions, or conform to prosocial
norms.
Allen Omoto and others (2009) have found that both other-focused motivation
and self-focused motivation predicted volunteerism.
When helping demands more of us, self-interest may keep us going.