Evolutionary and Motivational Factors: Why do people help?

• Prosocial Behaviors: Actions intended to benefit others

Evolutionary Factors in Helping

The “Selfish Gene”

• Evolutionary perspectives emphasize not the survival of the fittest individuals but the survival of the individuals’ genes

  • The behavior can eventually become part of the common inheritance of the species

• Kin Selection: The tendency to help genetic relatives

  • Could become an innate characteristic of humans

• Preferential helping of genetic relatives should be strongest when the biological stakes are particularly high

  • Lower-risk helping scenario: participants rated themselves as likely to help a friend as a sibling

  • Higher-risk scenarios: participants were significantly more willing to help a sibling than a friend

  • Under high-risk scenarios, genetic relatedness became more important in decisions about helping

Reciprocal Altruism

• Reciprocal Altruism: Helping someone else can be in your best interests because it increases the likelihood that you will be helped in return

  • Individuals who engage in reciprocal altruism should survive and reproduce more than individuals who don’t

  • Learning to cooperate can be rewarding for both parties

• Indirect Reciprocity: An individual who has helped someone becomes more likely to be helped by someone else

  • Individuals in the group are rewarded by others for being helpful and punished for being selfish

The Evolution of Empathy

• Empathy: Understanding or vicariously experiencing another individual’s perspective and feeling sympathy and compassion for that individual

  • Perspective Taking: Using the power of imagination to try to see the world through someone else’s eyes

  • Empathic Concern: Involves other-oriented feelings

• Seeing someone else experience positive or negative emotion triggers in an empathic perceiver’s brain activation of neural structures associate with the actual experience of that emotion

  • This activation predicts individuals’ tendencies to actually engage in everyday helping behavior

• Oxytocin is implicated in empathy and prosocial behaviors

• The importance of caring for offspring may have played a critical role in the evolution of empathy

Rewards of Helping: Helping Others to Help Oneself

Feeling Good

• Helping often feels good

• Improvements in mental and physical health

• Engaging in altruistic behavior, even though it costs the self, activates areas of the brain associated with receiving actual material rewards

• Negative state relief model: People who are feeling bad are inclined to help others in order to improve their mood

• Even when the costs of helping are high enough that it doesn’t feel good immediately, it can pay off in the long run

The Cost of Helping or of Not Helping

• Courageous Resistance: Thoughtful helping in the face of potentially enormous costs

• When the help involves constant and exhausting demands, the effects on helpers’ physical and mental health can be quite negative

• Most people often seem to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before deciding whether or not to help

• Good Samaritan laws

  • Encourage bystanders to intervene in emergencies by offering them legal protection

  • Increase the costs of failing to help

Altruism or Egoism: The Great Debate

• Egoistic: Motivated by selfish concerns

• Altruistic: Motivated by the desire to increase another’s welfare

The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

• 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

• It’s when your focus is on the other person that true altruism is possible

• Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: The proposition that empathic concern for a person in need produces an altruistic motive for helping

• When a person’s motive is altruistic, help will be given regardless of the ease of escape

• Too much empathy can be overwhelming if it’s not properly controlled

Convergence of Motivations: Volunteering

• People tend to engage in more long-term helping behavior due to multiple motives

• Both other-focused motivation and self-focused motivation predicted volunteerism

• People remained active volunteers longer if they’d initially endorsed self-oriented motives, rather than other-oriented motives

  • Purely altruistic motives may not keep individuals motivated long enough to withstand the personal costs associated with some kinds of prolonged helping

Helping as a Default?

• Our default inclination may prime us to be helpful, and only if we have time might we reconsider this in light of the potential costs

• When participants had to act really fast, they were more likely to cooperate with or help others than if they had time to think about the costs and benefits of their actions

Situational Influences: When do people help?

The Bystander Effect

• The effect whereby the presence of others exhibits helping

Noticing

• Presence of others can sometimes be distracting and divert attention away from noticing a victim’s plight

• Stimulus Overload: People may become so used to seeing people lying or sidewalks or hearing screams that they begin to tune them out

Interpreting

• People must interpret the meaning of what they notice

• The more ambiguous the situation is, the less likely it is that bystanders will intervene

• Pluralistic Ignorance: As everyone looks at everyone else for clues about how to behave, the entire group may be paralyzed by indecision

  • The person needing help is the victim

  • Each bystander thinks that other people aren’t acting bc they somehow know there isn’t an emergency

  • Everyone is confused and hesitant, but taking cues from each other’s inaction, each observer concludes that help is not required

Taking Responsibility

• Diffusion of Responsibility: The belief that others will or should intervene

  • Cannot occur if an individual believes that only they are aware of the victim’s needs

• The presence of others can even be imaginary and still produce some diffusion of responsibility

Deciding How to Help and Providing Help

• Obstacles:

  • Feeling a lack of competence in knowing how to help

  • Worrying that the potential costs of helping may be too great to justify taking the risk

  • The presence of other witnesses

• Audience Inhibition: When observers don’t act in an emergency because they fear making a bad impression on other observers

• The virtual presence of others reduced the likelihood that any one individual would intervene

Avoiding the Bystander Effect

• Groups in which the members know or feel connected to each other are usually more helpful than groups of strangers

• When effective helping would require multiple helpers, the presence of others can sometimes lead to more helping

  • The potential costs and benefits of helping would favor multiple helpers acting together

• When people think they’ll be scorned by others for failing to help, the presence of an audience increases their helpful actions

• Diffusion of responsibility can be defeated by a person’s role

  • A group leader is more likely than other group members to act in an emergency

  • Some occupational roles increase the likelihood of intervention

    • Nurses, teachers, etc.

• Teaching participants about the research makes them less vulnerable to these effects

Getting Help in a Crowd: What Should You Do?

• Make it very clear that you need help

• Single out particular individuals for help

Time Pressure

• When we are in a hurry or have a lot on our minds, we may be so preoccupied that we

  • Fail to notice others who need help

  • Become less likely to accept responsibility for helping someone

  • Decide that the costs of helping are too high because of the precious time that will be lost

Moods and Helping

Good Moods and Doing Good

• Weather

  • People answered more questions on sunny days than on cloudy ones

  • On sunny days restaurant customers gave more generous tips

  • Weather affects mood - sunny day cheers us up

• Smell

  • Pleasant scents put people in a good mood

  • People approached in a pleasant-smelling location were much more likely to help than people approached in a neutral-smelling location

  • People were in a better mood when they were in the pleasant-smelling environments

Bad Moods and Doing Good

• Under many circumstances, negative feelings can elicit positive behavior toward others

• People know that helping makes them feel good

• Although negative moods can often boost helping, it’s not as strong and consistent a relationship as that between good moods and helping

• Important variable: whether ppl accept responsibility for their bad feeling

• If we feel guilty for something bad we caused to happen, we’re more likely to act prosocially

Prosocial Media Effects

• Participants who had played the prosocial game were more likely to help their partner by assigning easy puzzles than were the participants who’d played the violent or neutral game

• Playing prosocial games at one point in time predicted increases several months or even two years later in empathy and in prosocial behavior

• Prosocial television can also have positive impact

Role Models and Social Influence

Role Models

• Observing helpful models increases helping in a variety of situations

• Seeing models of selfish, greedy behavior can promote selfish, greedy behavior in turn

• Why do people who exemplify helping inspire us to help?

  • They provide an example of behavior for us to imitate directly

  • When they’re rewarded for their helpful behavior, people who model helping behavior teach us that helping is values and regarding, which strengthens our own inclination to be helpful

  • The behavior of these models makes us think about and become more aware of the standards of conduct in our society

• Parents’ prosocial attitudes and tendencies have an influence on their children’s corresponding attitudes and tendencies

Social Influence

• Peer pressure and social influence

• ex: encouraging people to match others’ contributions, making public lists of who’s contributed, pay it forward, publicly naming their friends (ALS challenge)

• Reluctant Altruism: Altruistic kinds of behavior that result from pressure from peers or other sources of direct social influence

Personal Influences: Who is likely to help?

Are Some People More Helpful Than Others?

• Some people tend to be more helpful than others across multiple situations and over time

• Variation in helpfulness appears to be partly based on genetics

• There may be a heritable component to helpfulness

What is the Altruistic Personality?

• People who tend to be very agreeable and relatively humble are more likely to be helpful

• Children and adults who exhibit internalized and advanced levels of moral reasoning tend to behave more altruistically than others

  • Adhering to moral standards

  • Taking into account the needs of others when making decisions about courses of action

• Being able to take the perspective of others and experience empathy is clearly associated with helping and other prosocial behaviors in children and adults

• Empathy was associated with brain activation in individuals corresponding to the emotional experiences they saw other people were expressing in photos

  • This activation predicted the individuals’ degree of everyday helping behavior

• Empathy can be developed and taught

Culture and Helping

• The role of religion in promoting prosocial behavior is rather mixed

• Buddhism is especially strong in emphasizing compassion and tolerance for contradiction, and these qualities encourage prosocial behavior

• World Change Orientation: Motivator when people desire to make the world a better place

• Self-Transcendence: A value that emphasizes care for the welfare of other others, whether close or distant, and disengagement from selfish concerns

• Collectivism is not a predictor of helping

  • Collectivists may be more likely to help in-group members and less likely to help out-group members or to help in more abstract situations

  • People from the more individualistic states tended to exhibit greater charitable giving and volunteering than people from the more collectivistic states

  • When helping involves a more abstract kind of giving, individualism may be associated with greater helping

• Lower social class predicted more prosocial behavior

Interpersonal Influences: Whom do people help?

Perceived Characteristics of the Person in Need

• Attractiveness

  • Attractive people are more likely to be offered help and cooperation across a number of different settings

  • People who seem particularly nice, sociable, or happy, are more likely to receive help

  • People help attractive others in the hope of establishing some kind of relationship with an attractive person

  • Attractive people receive more help even when the helper does it anonymously

• If a person thinks that someone in need can be blamed for their situation, they’re less likely to help

A Little Help for Our Friends, and Others Like Us

• People are usually more helpful to those they know and care about than to strangers or superficial acquaintances

• The type of relationship people are in with each other can affect norms about helping

• Exchange Relationship: People give help with the expectation of receiving comparable benefits in return

• Communal Relationship: People feel responsibility for each other’s needs and are more likely to help, and are less likely to be concerned with keeping track of rewards and costs, than people in an exchange relationship are

• We are more likely to help others who are similar to us

• Empathy Gap: People consistently show greater empathy for the needs and suffering of in-group members than out-group members

• People who experience identity fusion with a group are more likely to help group members

• Identity Fusion: A strong sense of “oneness” and shared identity with a group and its individual members

• In-group biases in helping can be reduced significantly if the members of the different groups can perceive themselves as members of a common group

• No consistent overall relationship between racial similarity and helping

Gender and Helping

• In emergency situations, men are more helpful than women and women receive more help than men

• Men also may be more likely to help in dramatic ways when they feel in competition with another man

• Women are more likely to provide support for their friends and loved ones

• Overall, there doesn’t seem to be a general and consistent gender difference in who is more likely to help others

• Men ask for help less frequently than do women

Culture and Who Receives Help

• Social Norms: General rules of conduct established by society

• Norm of Reciprocity: If someone has helped us, we should help them in return

• Norm of Equity: When people are in a situation in which they feel over-benefited, they should help those who are under-benefited

  • A person is over-benefited when: they received more benefits than they earned

  • A person is under-benefited when: they receive fewer benefits than they earned

• Norm of Social Responsibility: People should help those who need assistance

• Norms of justice or fairness emphasize that people should help those who deserve their assistance rather than simply because they need help

• Perceptions of how much the person in need contributes to society might affect the helping decisions of collectivists more than individualists

• Implicit Social Support: Support that comes from just thinking about close others but that doesn’t involve actually seeking or receiving their help in coping with stressful events

• Helping requires the recognition of individual human beings with whom we can have a meaningful connection