Unit VI Scholarly (Soc Psy)

10	Helping and Prosocial Behavior

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Media Library

CHAPTER 10 Media Library

PREMIUM VIDEO

Ask the Experts    

Ask the Experts 10: Catherine Borshuk on Altruism

Social Psychology in Action    

Social Psychology in Action 10: Bystander Effect

JOURNAL    

Journal 10.1: Searching for the Prosocial Personality

Journal 10.2: Intervene to Be Seen

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Learning Objectives

10.1     Explain several general motives for why helping behaviors occur.

10.2     Analyze individual differences regarding why some people are more likely to help.

10.3     Apply psychological concepts regarding what situational variables lead to more or less helping in different settings.

Core Questions

1.   What motivates people to help others, in general?

2.   Why do some people help more than others?

3.   What circumstances make helping more or less likely?

Mark and Scott Kelly are identical twin astronauts who have devoted their lives to space exploration. In 2012, Scott volunteered to spend a year in space so that scientists could study long-term damages to his body due to space travel—and his twin Mark served as the Earth-bound control condition participant. Both astronauts have sacrificed time with their families and physical health so that other people can learn from their experiences.

Amer Almohibany / AFP / Getty Images

The White Helmets, Syria

“The White Helmets” is a nickname for the Syria Civil Defense organization, a nongovernmental, nonprofit group whose members tried to save lives of civilians in Aleppo, Syria, affected by the war there. According to Raed Al Saleh, the head of the White Helmets, these volunteers had saved over 60,000 lives by 2016—but more than 140 of the White Helmets died while trying to help others. The group was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and states that they try to live by the Koran’s words, “To save a life is to save all of humanity.”

Dan Kitwood / Getty Images News / Getty Images

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. At the age of 12, she stood up to the Taliban in Pakistan when she wrote a blog arguing that all women have a basic right to education. She has been the victim of several assassination attempts and threats, but she refuses to stop advocating for other girls around the world.

What motivates these people—and all of the other self-sacrificing heroes throughout history—to help others?

WHAT MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO HELP OTHERS, IN GENERAL?

  LO 10.1: Explain several general motives for why helping behaviors occur.

Ask the Experts Ask the Experts 10: Catherine Borshuk on Altruism

Have you ever donated blood? Spent a weekend volunteering for Habitat for Humanity? Given money to a charity? Held the door for someone holding a heavy package? If so, you’ve tried to help someone in need. Prosocial behavior is a general term for helping others, either on an individual level (like helping someone who’s lost) or on a group level (like donating to a charity). Helping others is perhaps one of the best parts of a social network, and we’ve all probably experienced the joy of feeling that we’ve made a positive difference in the world.

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However, the social psychology of helping is complicated, just like all of the topics covered in this book. One debate that might never go away is over exactly why people help others. Some people believe that it’s possible for us to exhibit altruism (sometimes called pure altruism), that is, to help others purely out of selfless concern for their well-being (Batson, 1990, 1998). Purely altruistic acts are motivated only by the desire to help—and nothing is expected in return. However, slightly more cynical (or more realistic, depending on your view) people argue that pure altruism is a myth. They argue that prosocial behaviors really stem from egoistic altruism, or helping behaviors done in exchange for some kind of personal benefit.

You might protest at this point, thinking, “But I do help others, expecting nothing in return!” Certainly, when we help a stranger, we might never expect to see that person again. When we give to charity, we are sacrificing those financial resources and things we might enjoy buying for ourselves. But when you engage in prosocial behaviors, do you feel like a better person? Are you happier and more fulfilled? If so—isn’t that a reward? If you don’t help, you might feel guilty or sad—and so, could helping be a selfish way to avoid those negative emotions? These indirect or emotional rewards of helping are part of egoistic altruism.

Social psychology has studied the motivations behind helping and prosocial behaviors in general in an attempt to answer these questions scientifically. So far, the field has offered four major explanations for why we engage in prosocial behaviors: evolutionary benefits to the larger group, social norms, avoiding negative emotions, and empathy (see Table 10.1). Let’s talk about each idea.

The Evolutionary Perspective: Prosocial Behaviors Help Our Groups Survive

Life is a little easier if you have good neighbors. It doesn’t matter whether they lived on the next farm three miles down the road or in the opposite apartment only three steps across the hall. For all social animals, there are evolutionary advantages to being a good neighbor. Among our ancient ancestors, these daily prosocial exchanges probably began over food. If you had killed more meat than you could consume before it got rotten, then you would probably trade away your extra meat for someone else’s excess fruit, grain, or other resource. It’s also possible that at some point, you might have given extra resources to someone in the group without immediately expecting something in return.

■  TABLE 10.1  Four Explanations for Prosocial or Helping Behaviors

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Social exchange refers to the evolution of prosocial trading of resources that strengthens the group. Cosmides and Tooby (1992) describe social exchange between humans as “universal and highly elaborated across all human cultures” (p. 164). We exchange favors with neighbors, exchange money for electronic devices, and even exchange promises when negotiating complex treaties between nations. The advantages of sharing food probably led to other prosocial exchanges such as cooperative hunting, mutual defense, communal childcare, and so on.

Over many generations, the trait of altruism would be naturally selected as one of the constellation of characteristics that made it so advantageous to live in cooperative groups. Selfish loners would be more likely to starve to death, be eaten by prey, or at least be less attractive as sexual and relationship partners. Their genes would slowly be washed out of the gene pool. In contrast, helpful, cooperative, generous altruists would survive by becoming skilled at group living. They would attract strong sexual and relationship partners. Their genes would slowly come to dominate the gene pool (see Nesse, 2001; Van Vugt & Van Lange, 2006). In this view, then, prosocial behaviors offer two advantages: (1) they help individuals survive by promoting opportunities to reproduce and thus pass on one’s genes, and (2) and they help the group survive in times of need (by spreading food around, etc.).

Kinship Selection.  We described the advantages of being a good neighbor, but you are probably more likely to loan money to a family member than to your neighbor. Kinship selection refers to the evolutionary urge to favor those with closer genetic relatedness. In his best-known book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin (1859, p. 238) pointed out that cattle breeders wanted cattle with “flesh and fat well marbled” together. But when they found such an animal, farmers couldn’t breed the animal—because they had already slaughtered it. Darwin noted that cattle breeders did the next best thing: They bred the dead animal’s closest living relatives. Darwin realized that these English cattle (and dog) breeders understood the principle now called inclusive fitness, the probability that our genetic heritage will be preserved in the offspring of relatives.

sjbooks / Alamy Stock Photo

Dawkins’s (1976) book The Selfish Gene discusses the genetic benefits of helping others—but only if the people you help are related to you and thus share your genes.

Another naturalist named William Hamilton proposed a mathematical equation for when prosocial behaviors are most likely to occur. According to Hamilton’s Inequality, prosocial behavior will emerge whenever (r × b) > c. That is, helping happens when r (the genetic relatedness of the person who needs help) multiplied by b (the benefits of helping) is greater than c (the cost of helping). What we might call altruism is really just our genes struggling to survive—and defaulting to our closest relatives when our own welfare is not in danger.

Inclusive fitness also appears to shape helping behavior among humans. Essock-Vitale and McGuire (1985) interviewed 300 randomly selected White, middle-class Los Angeles women about patterns of helping between kin (family members) and nonkin. They discovered that the women were more likely to help (a) those who were more closely related and (b) those with high reproductive potential.

Burnstein, Crandall, and Kitayama (1994) found a similar pattern when they presented undergraduates with life-or-death moral dilemmas. The students consistently recommended more help for close kin and for younger people. They even recommended more help for premenopausal rather than postmenopausal women. Human decision making seems to include an intuitive sense of inclusive fitness, due to the egoistic altruism motive of helping pass on our genes—even if that has to happen indirectly through our blood relatives.

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Reciprocal Altruism.  While helping is more likely within the family, we certainly help nonrelatives as well. Evolutionary motives for helping, such as keeping one’s group alive or getting more opportunities to reproduce, represent egoistic altruism (helping others for long-term personal benefits). In addition, within most groups where people see each other frequently, prosocial behaviors may occur due to reciprocal altruism, or the expectation that our helpfulness now will be returned in the future.

We humans are not alone when it comes to trading favors. Many other social animals also evolved reciprocal altruism (Van Vugt & Van Lange, 2006). Vampire bats, for example, famously feast on blood, usually from large mammals such as wild pigs, cows, and horses (but rarely from humans). They need a lot of blood. Vampire bats will drink about half their body weight during an uninterrupted feeding—so much that they sometimes have difficulty taking flight. DeNault and McFarlane (1995) discovered why vampire bats are so bloodthirsty. A vampire bat will die if it goes more than 48 to 72 hours without a blood meal. They also found that both male and female vampire bats will, in an apparent act of altruism, regurgitate some of their blood meal and share it with starving neighbors. But the story of vampire bat altruism is even more sophisticated.

© CanStockPhoto.com/kentoh

It may surprise you that vampire bats are a species with a highly evolved system of helping each other, through a system called reciprocal altruism.

Vampire bats are selective in their sharing of blood. When Wilkinson (1984) studied vampire bats in Costa Rica, he discovered that they were more likely to donate blood to those bats with the greatest need for a meal. Furthermore, their altruistic food sharing was not limited to their immediate kin. Frequent roost-mates were more likely to be the beneficiaries. And the evidence suggests that vampire bats are able to identify, remember, and not help those vampire bats that had not donated blood to other starving bats. Essentially, “cheaters can be detected and excluded from the system” (Wilkinson, 1990, p. 82). Helping can directly lead to increasing your own survival in times of need—a very adaptive pattern of behavior.

Inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism take the “nature” side of the nature versus nurture debate when viewed from the evolutionary psychology lens. What about the nurture side?

Prosocial Social Norms Increase Helping

Astronaut Scott Kelly still isn’t directly helping his brother Mark by going through health-threatening experiments in space. Putting his life at risk isn’t going to help either one of them. So, there must be other explanations for prosocial behaviors than just protecting our genes. One alternative explanation is that helping behaviors result from a group’s social norms. Taking risks is what astronauts do—it’s their social norm.

Recall from Chapter 7 that social norms are unwritten rules about how members of a group are expected to act. Some of these norms are specifically about helping. You already know about one norm, called reciprocity (the expectation that favors will be returned later). There are other relevant social norms, but the psychological forces that promote prosocial behaviors don’t easily yield their secrets to researchers.

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The Difficulty of Studying Prosocial Behavior.  Think about why it might be difficult to get our scientific arms around helping behavior. Random assignment to groups is almost always the best way to conduct an experiment. Random assignment means that each group is likely to start out as equal at the beginning of the experiment. Starting out equal creates a fair test, similar to marathon runners using the same starting point to see who runs the fastest. If the groups really are equal in every way except the independent variable, then any differences in the dependent variable (what you measure as the outcome) must be caused by the different experimental conditions.

But social psychologists can’t go around randomly assigning people to be in a life-threatening emergency as part of a comparison group for an experiment! Preventing such abuses is why organizations have institutional review boards (IRBs) that screen the ethics of research projects before they are allowed to go forward. Bierhoff, Klein, and Kramp (1991/2006) got around this problem by creating equivalent groups through a post hoc matched groups design. They started by identifying people who had provided first aid after a traffic accident that happened naturally; that became Group 1. Then they created a meaningful comparison group—Group 2—by (a) matching the people in Group 1 with others who were similar in sex, age, and socioeconomic status and (b) including only people in Group 2 who had witnessed an accident and not helped. It wasn’t as good as using random assignment, but it was a lot more ethical.

The comparison between these two groups indicated that people in Group 1—those who had helped—were more empathetic. No surprise there (we’ll discuss empathy later). But they dug even deeper and found that the Group 1 helpers also believed in two social norms: (1) a just world and (2) social responsibility.

Helping and Belief in a Just World.  Many people say that they offer help because they want to “pay it forward” or because “what goes around comes around.” But do we all eventually get what we deserve? Is goodness always rewarded and evil punished? Remember from Chapter 5 that belief in a just world is the idea that the world is a fair place in which good things happen to good people—and bad things happen to bad people (Lerner, 1980).

One of the most famous cases in the history of the civil rights movement demonstrates the connection between prosocial behavior and belief in a just world. In 1943, a Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver named James Blake ordered a Black passenger named Rosa Parks to get off his bus and then reenter through the rear door (the standard policy for Black passengers at the time). She complied, but while she was off the bus and heading toward the rear door, he simply drove away.

More than a decade later, on December 1, 1955, Blake was once again the driver when bus No. 2857 stopped to pick up a passenger, a White man. Blake ordered a Black woman to give up her seat—and it was the same woman he had left waiting on the side of the road 12 years earlier. This time, Parks refused to obey, leading to her arrest. Parks’s defiance made her into one of the heroines of the civil rights movement. This type of blatant discrimination did not fit into many people’s beliefs that the world should be just and fair.

What followed was a yearlong bus boycott; if people of color were not to be treated fairly, then they wouldn’t ride at all. The success of the boycott depended on hundreds of people making many small but critically important altruistic sacrifices; help from everyone was needed to benefit the group. Instead of riding a bus, people had to get up earlier and endure long walks to work, shop, and so forth—and enough people had to do it for the bus company to suffer from the lack of passengers.

In the long run, people in the boycott would be helping themselves (they would get better treatment on the bus), but in the short term, they had to make sacrifices for the good of the group. For many, the motivation was that racist laws were not just or fair. These people were willing to help the entire group of oppressed people of color by sacrificing their own comfort and convenience because they believed in a just world.

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Bettmann / Bettmann / Getty Images

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks participated in a movement to end racial discrimination that did not align with belief in a just world. This photo shows her riding the bus on the day Montgomery, Alabama, ended its racist policies.

Helping and the Social Responsibility Norm.  Parks and the other participants in the civil rights movement certainly believed that everyone should be treated equally—it’s only fair. However, a second social norm was also at play: the social responsibility norm. This norm is the idea that each individual has a duty to improve the world by helping those in need. If you are on an elevator with someone who is unable to push a button for the floor he needs (maybe his arms are full of boxes), it’s a social expectation that you should ask him what floor he wants and push the button for him.

The social responsibility norm can be tricky, though. Have you ever held the door open for someone, only to find yourself standing there holding the door for many more? How long are you expected to stay there, potentially making yourself late or separated from your friends who already went inside? You might have experienced a similar problem in a city with homeless people asking for spare change . . . you can’t give away all of your money or help every homeless person you see!

© istockphoto.com/

Are you more likely to give money to a homeless person who doesn’t appear to “deserve” being homeless? If so, the dual norms of a just world and social responsibility may have affected your behavior.

The social responsibility norm must be strong enough to “compel people to provide aid” but sensitive enough to help only “those who deserve help” (Simmons & Lerner, 1968, p. 224). This may be where the social responsibility norm overlaps with the just world norm. For example, some homeless people make signs reading “homeless vet” or “God bless you,” hoping that you will be more likely to help them if you believe they don’t “deserve” to be homeless.

We Help to Avoid Negative Emotions: Negative State Relief

Abraham Lincoln may have understood egoistic altruism. After a companion praised him for rescuing some baby pigs from drowning, Lincoln said that his behavior was “the very essence of selfishness.” When his companion asked him why, he replied, “I should have had no peace of mind all day had I gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those pigs. I did it to get peace of mind” (Sharp, 1928, cited in Batson, Bolen, Cross, & Neuringer-Benefiel, 1986). While this story may be more folklore than fact, Lincoln’s hypothetical words indicate an awareness that helping can really be selfish, done to simply avoid feeling sad or guilty later.

The negative state relief model of helping posits that seeing another person in need causes us emotional distress and that helping decreases those negative emotions (Dovidio & Penner, 2001; Schaller & Cialdini, 1990). This model supports the “egoistic” or selfish aspect of helping; behaviors that may appear to be pure altruism are really done for selfish reasons. Research on this idea has found that simply being in a negative mood doesn’t seem to increase helping behaviors (Forgas, 1998; Habashi, Graziano, & Hoover, 2016), but sadness and guilt do seem to increase compliance when someone directly requests help.

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CAPTAIN AMERICA: A PARAGON OF PROSOCIAL ACTION

Social Psychology in Popular Culture

AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

In the world of comic book superheroes, Captain America is one of the most pure of heart. Consistently ethical, loyal, and the epitome of patriotism, he also encapsulates the idea of pure altruism, or willingness to sacrifice himself to help others with no expectation of reward.

This altruism is highlighted in an early scene from Captain America: The First Avenger (Feige & Johnston, 2011), in which the military is attempting to decide which new recruit they will choose for their experimental program to create a super-soldier. The military officers argue with the scientists regarding which traits are most important, and they seem to settle on “guts” and heroism. To test the candidates, one of the officers throws a dummy grenade at the group of soldiers. While most of the men immediately run for cover, Steve Rogers jumps onto the grenade in an attempt to save everyone else. This ultimate altruism and self-sacrifice is what distinguishes him from the crowd and ultimately leads to him becoming Captain America.

An example of this phenomenon was found in a study of college students (McMillen & Austin, 1971). To start, the researchers had to experimentally manipulate participant emotions. They asked students to complete a multiple-choice exam in exchange for extra credit, and each participant was given information about the correct answers from a confederate when the researcher was out of the room. When the researcher returned and asked the participants if they had any knowledge of the study or the test, some participants said “no”—a harmless little white lie, right?

However, the next part of the study showed that people who told the lie might have felt at least a little guilty. All of the participants were then asked if they would help the researchers by volunteering to score some of the tests. Participants who had not lied earlier in the study helped for an average of about 2 minutes. In contrast, people who had lied to the researcher stayed for over an hour—an average of 63 minutes!

We can infer that the people who lied may have felt guilty and volunteered to help as a way to relieve that negative emotion (and potentially a negative view of themselves as bad people). The negative state relief model includes the idea that we help when we see other people suffering because not helping would make us feel bad, and we want to avoid that feeling. But it also suggests that when we’re in a bad mood for other reasons, helping can help improve our mood—so we might seek out helping situations purely to improve our own emotional state (Dietrich & Berkowitz, 1997; Fultz, Schaller, & Cialdini, 1988).

We Help Because We Care: The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

So far, you might think that social psychology is a pretty cynical science—all of the theories above conclude that people only help for selfish, egoistic reasons, because we want to comply with social norms, or because we want to avoid feeling guilt or sadness. If so, you’ll be relieved to know that the final theory suggests that sometimes, people help others simply out of the goodness of their hearts.

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Consider the case of two women on a commuter train in Portland who were being harassed because they appeared to be Muslim (Dobuzinskis, 2017). Their harasser was angrily yelling racial and religious slurs. Three men who saw the harassment occurring intervened—and all of them were stabbed by the harasser. Two of the men who bravely tried to help the women died due to the stabbing. All three people who stepped in risked physical danger for a complete stranger. The accompanying feature, “Social Psychology in Popular Culture,” discusses the altruism of the comic book superhero, Captain America, to highlight a well-known fictional example of risking one’s own life to help others. But knowing that there are real-life heroes like these men can be even more inspiring.

The empathy-altruism hypothesis proposes that feelings of compassion create a purely altruistic motivation to help (see Batson, 1991, 1998; Toi & Batson, 1982). While Batson, the major proponent of this hypothesis, doesn’t deny that all of the egoistic reasons for helping also exist, he argues that pure altruism is, indeed, possible. Batson’s foundational idea is that when we see people who need help, we empathize with them; we put ourselves in their shoes and feel compassion.

However, simply feeling empathy is not enough to predict helping—in this model, feeling empathy is necessary but not sufficient. To follow our compassion with actual prosocial behaviors, we must also:

•    be capable of helping (e.g., we may not offer to help a friend with calculus homework if we don’t understand the subject),

•    perceive that our help will actually benefit the person (e.g., we might not waste our time simply pretending to help), and

•    perceive that our help will be more beneficial than someone else’s help (e.g., we might not volunteer to lead a group if someone else is available who has more experience or expertise).

Thus, the empathy-altruism hypothesis suggests that pure altruism is possible, under the right circumstances. A classic study by Batson and his team (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981) asked women participants to listen while another young woman received painful electric shocks (as you might have suspected, no one actually got shocked in the study; the shocks were just the cover story and an example of experimental deception that the IRB allowed because it was necessary for the study to work). Participants also heard the woman explain that due to a childhood accident, she was particularly sensitive to shocks.

When the experimenter asked each participant if she was willing to take the other woman’s place, most of them agreed. This happened even though the participants thought their own part of study was done and they could go home (that is, they could easily escape from the situation). It is also interesting to note that participants were especially likely to volunteer to take the shocks if they believed that the other woman was very similar to themselves in attitudes and interests, which presumably helped the participants empathize with her.

Participants in the study thus volunteered to experience painful shocks, for no compensation, for a woman who was a stranger. While other researchers have argued that this prosocial choice may have, again, been due to things like avoiding feelings of guilt later (Schaller & Cialdini, 1988), it is hard to believe that empathy for the woman played no role in their decision to help. The people at the start of this chapter, such as the twin astronauts, the White Helmets, and Malala Yousafzai, all made significant sacrifices to help others. It may be that they did this simply because they want to help other people, despite the relatively high cost to their own lives—which would be pure altruism.

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The Main Ideas

•    Prosocial behavior is behavior designed to help others. Two theoretical reasons for helping are (1) pure altruism, or helping simply to benefit another person, or (2) egoistic altruism, helping because it somehow benefits the self.

•    According to the evolutionary perspective, prosocial behaviors evolved because they help one’s group survive and because people who helped more received greater opportunities for reproduction. Helping may also increase survival if it is reciprocated by others in the future.

•    Two social norms for prosocial behavior are belief in a just world (the idea that everyone should be treated fairly) and social responsibility (the idea that each individual has a duty to help the group).

•    While the negative state relief model suggests that people help others to avoid unpleasant emotions such as sadness or guilt, the empathy-altruism hypothesis suggests that pure altruism is possible.

  CRITICAL THINKING CHALLENGE

•    Consider the debate regarding whether true altruism is possible or whether all prosocial behaviors somehow benefit the person who helped (an egoistic altruism perspective). Do you, personally, think that pure altruism is possible? If so, can you identify any specific instances of pure altruism from your own life experiences?

•    One implicit idea behind social norms for prosocial behavior is that if you do not engage in these norms, people in your social groups may judge you negatively or punish you in some social way (e.g., ostracize you from the group). Have you ever experienced this? Have you ever failed to help someone and then perceived that other people were perceiving you negatively—or have you made this judgment about someone else?

•    Consider the three examples of helping behavior from the opening of this chapter. For each example, which theories or ideas from the first section of the chapter best explain that individual’s choice to help? Can you apply these ideas to those specific examples?

WHY DO SOME PEOPLE HELP MORE THAN OTHERS?

  LO 10.2: Analyze individual differences regarding why some people are more likely to help.

The theories you just learned explain general helping behaviors—but you know from life experience that some people are more likely to help than others. Think again about Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who stood up to the Taliban and risked her life (several times) to help girls everywhere have access to an education. There are millions of other young girls in similar situations. What motivates some people to help, while others simply walk on by? Let’s consider personality, religious norms, gender, and culture.

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A Prosocial Personality

Is there a “helping” personality trait? If so, people high in this trait would be more likely to help a variety of different people in a variety of situations, compared to people low in the trait. Several different versions of a prosocial personality have been explored by social psychologists.

JOURNAL Journal 10.1: Searching for the Prosocial Personality CLICK TO SHOW

On one hand, for example, some research has found that people are more likely to help if they have a high need for approval or acceptance from others (Deutsch & Lamberti, 1986). Helping is also more likely to come from people who are high in empathy, as the empathy-altruism hypothesis would predict (Krueger, Hicks, & McGue, 2001). On the other hand, prosocial behaviors are negatively correlated with a trait called Machiavellianism, meaning the more Machiavellian someone is, the less likely he or she is to help another person. Named after the 15th-century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, this trait describes people who are manipulative, distrustful of others, and egocentric.

One of the most popular general personality theories in psychology, the Big 5 Model, suggests that across cultures, five fundamental personality traits differentiate between people and predict behaviors (see McCrae & Costa, 1987; Mooradian, Davis, & Matzler, 2011). To learn what the five traits are—and how they might be related to prosocial behaviors—see the “Spotlight on Research Methods” feature. In addition, you can rate your own prosocial tendencies by scoring yourself on two related personality traits in the “Applying Social Psychology to Your Life” feature.

Religious Norms Promote Obligations and Options

Most major world religions have norms that support prosocial behavior. For example, giving a percentage of your wealth to the poor is one of the five pillars of Islam. There is a similar obligation within Judaism, called Tzedakah, which emphasizes that giving is a matter of justice rather than generosity. Hinduism promotes Yajna, a term that suggests that sacrificing for others is a way of behaving in harmony with universal laws. The words of Jesus advise extreme altruism: “Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you” and “Sell your possessions and give to the poor.” All these religious ideals influence altruistic behavior. However, the role of religious norms in prosocial behavior is more subtle than obedience to those commandments.

Intrinsic Versus Quest Religiosity.  Batson and Gray (1981) discovered that why you are religious influences how you are religious. Recall from Chapter 9 that people high in intrinsic religiosity attempt to internalize their faith’s teachings and live according to them. In contrast, quest religiosity uses religion as a way to question, doubt, and reexamine values and beliefs. In other words, it might not matter what religion you belong to—but what matters is what motivates your religious belief.

In the Batson and Gray (1981) experiment, 60 religiously oriented women were confronted with someone in emotional distress. Those who were oriented toward intrinsic religiosity offered their help whether or not it was welcome; they were responding to their own internal need to be helpful (a more egoistic response). However, those oriented toward religion as a quest offered help only if the person wanted help; they were responding to the expressed needs of the victim (a more altruistic response). This pattern has been replicated by others (e.g., Hansen, Vandenberg, & Patterson, 1995). In other words, why you are religious influences how you provide prosocial behavior based on religious motives.

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PERSONALITY AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Spotlight on Research Methods

“The search for the prosocial personality has been long and controversial” (Habashi etal., 2016, p. 1177). This is the first sentence in an article devoted to studying whether different personality traits really can be linked to helping others. Habashi and her colleagues started with the most popular general theory on personality, which most researchers call the Big 5 Model of Personality (McCrae & Costa, 1987; Mooradian etal., 2011). According to this model, five culturally universal personality traits predict behavior fairly reliably:

•    Openness to experience: enjoyment of adventure, new experiences, independence, curiosity

•    Conscientiousness: attention to detail, responsibility, self-discipline, high achievers

•    Extraversion: highly social, energetic, assertive, spontaneous

•    Agreeableness: cooperative, peacemakers, compassionate toward others

•    Neuroticism: anxious, prone to stress, more likely to be depressed and socially insecure

When you consider these five traits, which would you hypothesize is most likely to be associated with more prosocial behaviors?

The research team asked college students at Purdue University to come to a session under the cover story that they would be reviewing a new program for the university’s radio station. The broadcast was an interview with a senior student, “Katie,” at Purdue who had lost both parents and a younger sibling in a car accident; she was now left with no financial resources and no family support, and she was struggling to graduate while caring for her remaining younger siblings. The participants didn’t know that “Katie” was not a real person.

All of the participants completed self-report scales of the “Big 5” personality traits. The major outcome of the study was measured when the participants were given the opportunity to help Katie. The participants wrote down how many hours they would volunteer to help her personally, how many hours they would work on trying to get others to help, and how much money they would donate. They also rated how much personal distress they felt when thinking about Katie’s story. Each of these variables was correlated with each of the “Big 5” personality traits; the results are shown in Table 10.2. Remember that correlations can range from −1.0 to +1.0, and numbers closer to 1 in either direction mean that the two variables are more closely associated with each other.

As you can see, only agreeableness was significantly correlated (shown in bold in the table), with people being more likely to donate their time and money to a person in need. Being higher in openness to experience, conscientiousness, or extraversion had no relationship with prosocial behaviors in this study. Interestingly, people who were high in either agreeableness or neuroticism were likely to say that Katie’s story caused them personal distress—but only those high in agreeableness followed that up by expressing a willingness to help.

■  TABLE 10.2  Statistically Significant Correlations

SOURCE: Data from Mccrae & Costa (1987) & Mooradian et al. (2011).

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MEASURING PROSOCIAL PERSONALITY TRAITS

Applying Social Psychology to Your Life

In the Spotlight on Research Methods feature, you read about a study (Habashi etal., 2016) showing that two personality traits are positively correlated with feelings of personal distress on hearing about someone in need of help: agreeableness and neuroticism. However, only people high in agreeableness actually offered to help.

Researchers in that study assessed participants’ personality traits using one of the most popular measures of the “Big 5” traits (John & Srivastava, 1999). The items shown here are from the same scale, but we have included only items meant to measure agreeableness and neuroticism (not the other three traits in the model).

Instructions: Next to each item, write a number indicating whether the word or phrase describes how you see yourself, using this scale:

I see myself as someone who . . .

_____   1.  tends to find fault with others.

_____   2.  is depressed, blue.

_____   3.  is helpful and unselfish with others.

_____   4.  is relaxed, handles stress well.

_____   5.  starts quarrels with others.

_____   6.  can be tense.

_____   7.  has a forgiving nature.

_____   8.  worries a lot.

_____   9.  is generally trusting.

_____ 10.  is emotionally stable, not easily upset.

_____ 11.  can be cold and aloof.

_____ 12.  can be moody.

_____ 13.  is considerate and kind to almost everyone.

_____ 14.  remains calm in tense situations.

_____ 15.  is sometimes rude to others.

_____ 16.  gets nervous easily.

_____ 17.  likes to cooperate with others.

Scoring: First, reverse-score Items 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 14, and 15. This means that if you wrote a 1 it becomes a 5, a 2 becomes a 4, a 3 stays the same, a 4 becomes a 2, and a 5 becomes a 1.

Then, add up your scores for the odd-numbered items; this is your score for agreeableness. It can range from 9 to 45. Next, add up your scores for the even-numbered items; this is your score for neuroticism. It can range from 8 to 40. According to Habashi etal. (2016), higher numbers in either trait predict more emotional distress when you see someone else in need, but only higher numbers in agreeableness predict that you will actually help others consistently.

Source: John and Srivastava (1999).

When Religion Isn’t Enough: The Good Samaritan Experiment.  In the Christian Bible, there’s a story called “The Good Samaritan.” A traveler is stripped, beaten, and left to die next to a road. Two religious men, a priest and a Levite, both pass by and fail to help the man. Finally, a man from Samaria (considered unworthy by the priest and the Levite) stops and helps the traveler. This parable was used in a creative way by social psychologists to test the strength of prosocial religious motives.

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In 1973, Darley and Batson staged what is now known as “The Good Samaritan” field experiment. Their study pitted the power of religious norms against the power of an immediate situation. The participants were 40 students at the Princeton Theological Seminary who all passed the same needy person in an alley: a man slumped in a doorway who coughed and groaned as the students passed by. As you may already have guessed, the man was really a confederate of the research team.

These ministers-in-training didn’t know it, but before they walked past the man in need, each had already had been assigned to different groups based on two different independent variables. The first independent variable divided students into two groups. One group prepared a brief talk about careers for ministers; the other group prepared a brief talk about the Good Samaritan story. The researchers wanted to know if thinking about this story—which is specifically about stopping to help people in need—would make the students more likely to, well, help someone in need. After preparing their speeches, all of the participants were told to go to another building to record their talks—a short walk designed to take them directly past the groaning man in the alley.

The second independent variable further subdivided the students into three groups based on an urgency manipulation. One group was told, “They were expecting you a few minutes ago . . . the assistant should be waiting for you, so you’d better hurry.” The instructions were more moderate for a second group: “The assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” A third group—the control group—had no reason to rush: “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready, but you might as well head on over.” Table 10.3 lays out the setup of this interesting 2 X 3 factorial design.

The results of this famous study might surprise you (see Figure 10.1). First, across all six conditions, only about 40% of the seminary students stopped to help the groaning man. Perhaps even more interestingly, preparing a speech explicitly about the need to help (the Good Samaritan story) did not have a statistically significant effect on whether people helped. What did matter was whether the participants were in a hurry. If they were feeling rushed, then they were much less likely to stop to offer help.

In fact, Darley and Batson (1973) observed that “on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way” (p. 107). It seems that religious social norms or religiosity can make some people more likely to help but only if they don’t have other things to do.

Perceiving and assessing our own moral behavior is brimming with opportunities to deceive ourselves, and Batson suggests that we often want to appear to be making moral decisions while actually avoiding inconvenience by doing as little as possible. Thus, moral hypocrisy is the motivation to appear moral while avoiding the costs of behaving morally (Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997; Batson, Thompson, & Chen, 2002). Prosocial behavior—and especially pure altruism—is much more likely to come from people who are high in moral integrity instead, the motivation to actually live up to one’s own standards of morality and ethics.

■  TABLE 10.3  The Six Conditions in Darley and Batson’s (1973) “Good Samaritan” Study

SOURCE: Darley & Batson (1973).

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■  FIGURE 10.1  Do religious motivations increase helping behavior? The results from Darley and Batson’s (1973) “Good Samaritan” study.

SOURCE: Darley & Batson (1973).

Gender and Communal Behaviors

Who helps more—men or women? Many gender differences in helping patterns persist cross-culturally. For example, women across cultures tend to behave with greater social and ethical sensitivity, a higher degree of nurturance, and less combativeness than men (Kamat & Kanekar, 1990; Miranda & Kanekar, 1993). While many cultures include social norms around caring for aging parents, this obligation often falls to women more than men in terms of everyday tangible support (Lee, Spitze, & Logan, 2003; Silverstein, Gans, & Yang, 2006). What makes men and women act differently in prosocial situations?

Gender Socialization: Agency and Communion.  Just as different countries have different cultures with different social norms (see the next section for more), men and women also have different social expectations. Gender socialization establishes the expected patterns of behavior deemed appropriate for men and women (see Bakan, 1966; Eagly, 2009) by rewarding each sex for doing what is considered “appropriate.” This includes how—and when—to be helpful.

One key dimension of gender socialization is agency, the stereotypically male-oriented pattern of behavior that emphasizes being masterful, assertive, competitive, and dominant (see Spence & Buckner, 2000). In contrast, communion is a stereotypically female-oriented pattern of behavior that emphasizes being friendly, unselfish, other-oriented, and emotionally expressive. Agency and communion describe a pattern of gender differences that is common across cultures (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2007), and while agency promotes the self, communion emphasizes the good of the group and being kind to others. Several researchers have suggested that girls are raised to have higher moral reasoning and empathy than boys, which leads to more helping and prosocial behaviors (see Eisenberg, Fabes, & Shea, 1989; Kumru, Carlo, Mestre, & Samper, 2012).

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One way the difference between agency and communion translates into behavior is through career choices, including the “helping” professions. Eagly (2009) drew on the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics to identify the different prosocial occupations deemed appropriate for men and for women. Women are a minority within prosocial professions that stereotypically require initiative and physical strength, such as firefighters (only 5% are women), police officers (15%), and soldiers (14%). By contrast, women are a significant majority within professions that stereotypically require cooperation and nurturing such as preschool and kindergarten teachers (98%), social workers (79%), and registered nurses (92%; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009).

In other words, both men and women help; gender norms simply train them toward different prosocial paths. A study in Polynesia found that girls engage in more prosocial behavior than boys, but they hypothesized it is because girls are required to engage in cooperative housework for the good of the family, while boys are allowed to be more independent (Graves & Graves, 1985). We train children to be helpful—but how this is defined appears to differ based on whether we’re training boys or girls.

Eagly’s (2009) review concluded that “men tend to extend heroic help in dangerous emergencies” (p. 649), intervene in accidents to help strangers, are chivalrous to help women, and are more likely to serve their nation in war. Women may be less inclined to stop to offer help to someone on the side of the road, for example, due to fears of assault. But in a 2010 survey of over 200,000 students first entering college, 62% of men and 75% of women said that helping others is either “very important” or “essential” (Pryor, Hurtado, DeAngelo, Blake, & Tran, 2010).

Changing Patterns of Gender Socialization.  Over the past 50 years, there have been profound changes in gender expectations across many cultures. Warfare, for example, relies more on technology than brute strength, and that has opened opportunities for and acceptance of women in the military. These changes may affect gendered helping behaviors.

Changing gender roles were examined in depth by Diekman across a series of studies. In her first publication on the topic (Diekman & Eagly, 2000), her findings showed that both men and women perceive that over time, women are remaining fairly stable in their high levels of communion and are simultaneously increasing in their levels of agency. In a series of follow-up studies (Diekman & Goodfriend, 2006), she found that both men and women are relatively accepting of these changes. Both expect women to increasingly possess both traditionally “feminine” and traditionally “masculine” characteristics.

 

© istockphoto.com/twilightproductions & © istockphoto.com/gchutka

As time progresses, traditional ideas of how and when women versus men help others may change.

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Interestingly, women in these studies (Diekman & Goodfriend, 2006) expressed displeasure that men were not equally changing to increase in their perceived levels of communion. Recall that the traditionally feminine traits—communion—refer to helping and prosocial qualities such as being friendly, unselfish, other-oriented, and cooperative. Agentic traits are relatively selfish and self-promoting. Some of the women in these studies noted that men need to make more efforts to be nurturing, care for children, and generally help family dynamics in personal ways. When it comes to helping at home, at least, dynamic gender roles are promoting a more equal distribution of tasks. Similarly, Jackson (2006) anticipates a gradual weakening of sex differences in prosocial behavior as time goes by.

Cross-Cultural Differences in Helping

Two of the “big questions” in this book are “nature versus nurture” and “how much are thoughts and behaviors influenced by culture?” Culture is one way that nurture influences our general behavioral tendencies, and prosocial behavior is no exception. Several studies have investigated how cultural norms and values influence the likelihood of people to engage in helping behaviors.

In general, studies have shown that collectivistic cultures lead to more prosocial behaviors than individualistic cultures (Barrett etal., 2004; Bontempo, Lobel, & Triandis, 1990)—but individuals in collectivistic cultures are especially likely to help people in their own group (Kemmelmeier, Jambor, & Letner, 2006). One review of studies examining 21 different nations showed that cultures focused on the good of your own group were less likely to help strangers but potentially more likely to help family members, an interesting mix of the “nature versus nurture” question regarding prosocial behaviors (Chen, Kim, Mojaverian, & Morling, 2012).

Some recent research has focused on helping in children and adolescents in different cultures. For example, one study focused on 5th- through 10th-grade students and their prosocial moral reasoning, or ability to analyze moral dilemmas in which two or more people’s needs conflict with each other and where formal rules of what to do are absent (Carlo, Koller, Eisenberg, Da Silva, & Frohlich, 1996). These researchers hypothesized that prosocial moral reasoning might be influenced by cultural values and norms and therefore conducted a quasi-experimental study comparing children from two different cultures. They gave U.S. and Brazilian participants seven dilemmas such as this one:

One day Mary was going to a friend’s party. On the way, she saw a girl who had fallen down and hurt her leg. The girl asked Mary to go to the girl’s house and get her parents so the parents could come and take her to a doctor. But if Mary did run and get the girl’s parents, Mary would be late to the party and miss the fun and social activities with her friends. (p. 233)

After each dilemma, the children indicated what the main character should do and why. Results show that the U.S. children got higher internalized moral reasoning scores, on average, than Brazilian children—a finding that was a replication of other studies (e.g., Hutz, De Conti, & Vargas, 1994). The researchers suggested this difference may be due to the emphasis on critical thinking in U.S. school systems.

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However, they also point out that patterns of response regardless of culture in the children indicated that individual participants with self-focused concerns about maximizing one’s one pleasure were negatively correlated with helpfulness, whereas other-oriented, communal concerns were positively correlated with generosity and prosocial moral reasoning (Carlo etal., 1996).

Another quasi-experimental study compared German and Indian 19-month-old toddlers in their prosocial behavior (Kärtner, Keller, & Chaudhary, 2010). Here, researchers played with the toddlers and pretended that a teddy bear’s arm broke off. Prosocial behavior from the toddlers was measured by whether they tried to comfort the researcher (by hugging, kissing, etc.) or offered a new toy to replace the bear. In both samples, about 30% of the toddlers showed prosocial behavior—the two different cultures did not show statistically significant results.

However, the researchers suggested that there were different motives driving helping behaviors, based on culture. When the toddlers’ mothers were compared to each other across the two cultures, mothers from India emphasized relational social norms (such as obedience and helping) more than mothers from Germany. This different emphasis seemed to motivate the Indian children to help due to situational cues, while the German children seemed motivated by empathy. Thus, this study emphasized that while objective helping behaviors may look the same from the outside, motives for helping may change based on culture (Kärtner etal., 2010); they note, “there may be culture-specific developmental paths to prosocial behavior” (p. 913).

A final example of research on cross-cultural differences and similarities compared adolescents from Spain and Turkey (Kumru etal., 2012). Spain and Turkey were chosen because both are quickly moving from agricultural, patriarchal, and traditional cultures to modern and more egalitarian cultures—but Spain has moved along this continuum more quickly. As the researchers expected, the Spanish adolescents displayed higher levels of prosocial moral reasoning and prosocial behavior. Again, they suggest this may be due to different emphases in the school systems, with Spanish schools emphasizing abstract and deductive reasoning. They also noted, however, that motives for helping might change based on culture. Their data indicated that in Spanish culture, helping seemed to be motivated by gaining the approval of others. If this is true, the helping is egoistic and not truly altruistic.

The Main Ideas

•    Prosocial behavior is associated with certain personality traits. Specifically, Machiavellianism (a trait associated with cynicism and manipulation of others) is negatively correlated with helping, while agreeableness (a trait associated with cooperation and empathy) is positively correlated with helping.

•    While some research shows that certain types of religiosity are associated with prosocial behaviors, other studies find that situational demands (such as whether people are in a hurry) are more predictive of who is most likely to help.

•    Culture encourages men to be more agentic (independent and competitive) and women to be more communal (concerned with caring for others), but both traits are associated with helping in different settings. Research has also investigated whether national culture affects the likelihood of helping and motives behind helping.

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  CRITICAL THINKING CHALLENGE

•    Research in this section noted that some personality traits are associated with more prosocial behavior (such as agreeableness and being high in empathy) while others are linked to less prosocial behavior (such as Machiavellianism). If you wanted to design school activities for children that would promote agreeableness and decrease Machiavellianism, what kinds of activities would you create? What would you suggest parents could do to encourage agreeableness and discourage Machiavellianism in their children at home?

•    What hypotheses do you have about whether religious people are more likely to have moral integrity versus moral hypocrisy? Can you think of people in your life who display one tendency or the other—and can you see patterns in the two types of people? Do you think one path over the other is based on life experiences, related personality traits, forms of religion, or other variables? Can you think of a way to scientifically test your hypotheses?

•    Do you agree with Diekman’s research participants that women are changing over time to be high in both communion and agency? And do you agree that men seem to be staying high in agency but seem not to be changing much in their levels of communion? Explain your view and provide at least two examples.

•    What aspects of your national culture or particular subcultures either encourage or discourage helping of others? Does your culture encourage helping some kinds of people, or helping in some situations, more than others?

New York Daily News Archive / New York Daily News / Getty Images

Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in 1964.

WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE HELPING MORE OR LESS LIKELY?

  LO 10.3: Apply psychological concepts regarding what situational variables lead to more or less helping in different settings.

The scientific study of what situations make people more or less likely to help was inspired by a grisly murder. In Queens, New York, in 1964, a young bartender named Kitty Genovese arrived home to her apartment complex around 3:00 a.m. A man chased her across the parking lot with a hunting knife and stabbed her twice. When she screamed for help, the man ran away . . . but he came back a few minutes later, stabbed her several more times, sexually assaulted her, and stole $49. He then left her in the hallway, bleeding. Overall, the attacks took place over half an hour, and Genovese died about an hour later.

Unfortunately, murders take place every day. Why was this one so special? Two weeks after Genovese’s death, the New York Times ran a story that made her famous. The headline of the story was, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” (Gansberg, 1964). According to the story, 37 people in Genovese’s apartment complex either heard her screams for help or saw the attack happening, but not a single one called the police. The story claimed that one neighbor actually turned up his radio to avoid the annoying noise of the attack. Several people used the story as an example of society’s increasing apathy and callousness toward victims—a lack of prosocial behavior when it’s needed most—especially in big cities like New York.

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KITTY GENOVESE’S STORY ON FILM

Social Psychology in Popular Culture

New York Daily News Archive / New York Daily News / Getty Images

The murder of Kitty Genovese—and the headlines about how many people witnessed it without helping or even calling the police—are infamous. Even though later investigations questioned whether it was really true that 37 people failed to help, the Genovese story has inspired not only social psychology research but also two films. Both were released in 2016; the first is called 37 (Grasten etal., 2016) and the second is called The Witness (Solomon, Genovese, Jacobson, & Valva, 2016).

37 is a fictional version of the famous murder in which the characters represent the types of people who might have lived in Genovese’s apartment building. The film suggests a wide variety of reasons why people might not have helped. Characters experience all of the following situations (and more) that lead them to not help:

•    Interpreting her cries for help as a radio program

•    Not hearing the noise due to family arguments

•    Mental illness leading to incorrect attributions that the cries were hallucinations

•    The belief that the noises were simply children playing a prank

•    Concern that the police might ask uncomfortable questions about the neighbors’ personal lives

In a review of the film for the New York Times (2016), critic Andy Webster comments about the final scenes, “Pressure builds in a protracted sequence of sputtering lobby lights, leaky fixtures, dying dowagers, the assault itself and the hysteria of [a] young girl. Implicit is the idea that the murder embodied a neighborhood’s moral decay.”

The second film, The Witness, was the result of Genovese’s brother Bill, who was only 12 years old at the time of her murder. He was able to speak with some of the former friends of his sister and with people still living in the neighborhood, as well as with his extended family. The film raises some of the same doubts as the film 37 about the accuracy of the original report. But it also explores the effect of so much public and research attention on the remaining family members.

What really happened that night is still controversial. But it is gratifying to see that the searching questions raised by this case study and the subsequent films continue to provoke deep conversations about social responsibility.

While the story about Genovese’s uncaring neighbors was sensational, it was also wrong (Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007). Later investigations showed that several people did call the police. One neighbor yelled at the attacker to leave her alone. Interviews with the rest of the neighbors revealed that while they admitted they had heard something, they had no idea it was a murder; they simply thought it was a couple arguing or a group of drunk friends. You can read more about the Kitty Genovese story in the accompanying “Social Psychology in Popular Culture” feature.

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Even if the details weren’t accurate, several social psychologists heard about the case and were inspired to scientifically study helping. Some people focused on general motives to help, personality traits, or culture, which you read about earlier in this chapter. Others, however, noted that regardless of family bonds, personality, culture, or any of the other variables discussed so far in this chapter, situational circumstances seem to make almost everyone more or less likely to help.

More People = Less Helping

When is helping most likely? An obvious answer might be the more people, the better! If 100 people see someone faint suddenly, aren’t the chances of the person getting help 100 times better than if only one person is there to witness the problem? It turns out that the answer is no. Why not?

JOURNAL Journal 10.2: Intervene to Be Seen CLICK TO SHOW

The Urban Overload Hypothesis.  Earlier, we discussed the social responsibility norm that everyone should help others. But we also pointed out that if you tried to help every homeless person you saw in a big city, you would quickly be out of money. There would still be hundreds of homeless people needing help—and one of them now might be you. Often, people from a rural area who visit a big city for the first time feel that the city-dwellers seem harsh, callous, and unfriendly . . . but there are psychological reasons for their behavior.

REUTERS/Juan Medina

The bystander effect is the ironic tendency for people to receive less help when more people are there to witness the problem.

One explanation is the urban overload hypothesis, which points out that people in cities avoid social interactions with strangers simply because they are overwhelmed by the number of people they encounter each day (Milgram, 1970). On the way to work, someone from a city may pass hundreds of others on the street, in the subway, or in public parks. They don’t have time to smile and say hi to everyone, much less help every tourist with a map and a confused look or every homeless person they see. Even highly agreeable and empathetic people would be exhausted.

Many studies have supported the urban overload hypothesis, which provides for more information about cultural differences—but this time the cultural comparison is urban versus rural cultures. For example, when researchers pretended to be bleeding and yelping in pain, about half of people in small towns stopped to help, compared with only 15% of people in large cities (Amato, 1983). Growing up in a small town and learning “small town values” doesn’t seem to matter much, either; in a review of 35 studies, prosocial behavior occurred more in rural areas than in urban areas, regardless of where the witnesses grew up as children (Steblay, 1987).

Diffusion of Responsibility: The Bystander Effect.  In the years shortly after Kitty Genovese’s murder, Latané and Darley didn’t think that urban overload was enough to explain why crowds of people who witness emergencies fail to help. They suggested that another explanation could easily be applicable: diffusion of responsibility (Darley & Latané, 1968; Latané & Darley, 1970). Remember from Chapter 8 that diffusion of responsibility occurs when each person in a group feels less accountable to take action because there are other people who can do something.

Social Psychology in Action Social Psychology in Action 10: Bystander Effect

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Diffusion of responsibility directly explains why, ironically, you’re more likely to be helped with fewer people around. Latané and Darley suggested, for example, that if Genovese’s neighbors did hear the emergency and didn’t do anything about it, they could easily have simply thought, “Someone else must have already called the police.” It’s not that people didn’t care; they just assumed their help might not be needed because others might help. The finding that the likelihood of being helped in an emergency is negatively correlated with the number of people who witness that emergency is now known as the bystander effect (Darley & Latané, 1968; Latané & Darley, 1970).

The bystander effect has been found in a wide variety of settings. For example, one study showed that managers who know of fraud occurring in their organizations are more likely to report it when they alone have the relevant information (Brink, Eller, & Gan, 2015). Another study found the bystander effect in witnesses to theft (van Bommel, van Prooijen, Elffers, & Van Lange, 2014). Similarly, the number of witnesses to cyberbullying has been shown to have a negative correlation with each witness’s sense of responsibility and intention to intervene (Obermaier, Fawzi, & Koch, 2016). Other research has found that less helping behavior occurs when people play multiplayer video games than when they play single-player games, both during game play and afterward (Stenico & Greitemeyer, 2015).

However, there seem to be boundaries around the bystander effect. For example, diffusion of responsibility seems to decrease when the specific situation requires help from multiple people instead of just one (Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2013, 2015). In addition, witnesses of a staged bike theft were more likely to stop the thief when he or she looked dangerous only when other witnesses were present; in this case, the participants may have felt that the presence of other people made it safer to confront a dangerous-looking criminal (Fischer & Greitemeyer, 2013). People are also more likely to help (despite other witnesses being present) if they know a security camera is filming them (van Bommel etal., 2014).

Finally, in a field study conducted in bars throughout Amsterdam, researchers purposely dropped items to see who would help pick them up. Results showed that the size of the bar’s crowd had no influence on helping (a lack of the traditional bystander effect). However, the amount of alcohol consumed before the help was needed did influence how quickly help was offered: Drunker people helped faster (van Bommel, van Prooijen, Elffers, & Van Lange, 2016).

We Help People We Like (and Who Are Similar to Us)

You’re probably not shocked by this news: We’re more likely to help people we like. Obviously, you’ll be more inclined to make sacrifices for people who are friends or family. The more interesting news might be that we’re also more likely to help people we assume we would like, even when they are complete strangers. How do we decide how likeable we think they might be? One answer is that we assume we’d like people who are similar to ourselves.

You already know that we tend to spend time with our ingroups, which leads to stereotypes about outgroups (see Chapter 9). It follows that we’re also more likely to help people we think are members of our ingroups (Dovidio & Morris, 1975). An early study done in 1970 on a Midwestern university campus showed this tendency with a very simple procedure. Confederates of the study dressed in either conservative or “hip/counterculture” clothes (remember, this was the time of hippies!) and walked around campus asking other students for some spare change to make a phone call. When the confederate asked for help from someone wearing the same type of clothes, about two thirds of them helped, compared with less than half when they approached someone dressed differently (Emswiller, Deaux, & Willits, 1971).

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Anyone familiar with international soccer (“football” to everyone except people living in the United States) knows that team loyalty and rivalries are extremely important—but are they so important they might mean you don’t help someone who favors a different team? In 2005, a research group (Levine, Prosser, Evans, & Reicher, 2005) tested this question with participants who were fans of the Manchester United team in England. Each participant seemingly happened upon a person (a confederate of the researchers) who was jogging along but then slipped and appeared to be hurt. The jogger was wearing a jersey that was either (1) a blank, generic sports jersey; (2) one supporting Manchester United; or (3) one supporting Liverpool, which is Manchester United’s rival team.

The results can be seen in Table 10.4 in the “Study 1” rows. The confederate was much more likely to be helped if he was wearing a shirt indicating at least one similarity to the participant. In this case, only one participant failed to help a fellow fan of the team. In contrast, people wearing a plain jersey or a rival team’s jersey were helped by only about one third of the participants.

But a closer look at Table 10.4 shows that there was a second study—and this time, helping behaviors for the confederate wearing a Liverpool jersey showed the opposite effect! How did the researchers get the Manchester United fans to help someone supposedly supporting their rival team? This time, before the participants came across the hurt jogger, they filled out a survey focusing on how all soccer fans have good qualities and on what all these fans have in common, regardless of team alliance. While Study 1 participants might have thought of a Liverpool fan as a rival, Study 2 participants were primed to think about how similar all soccer fans are to each other—and this perception of similarity switched their behavior toward helping.

Latané and Darley’s Five-Step Model of Helping

What can we conclude about when people are most likely to help? To examine that question, let’s return to the work of Latané and Darley. These two researchers conducted a long series of creative and informative studies about when people will (or won’t) help in emergencies. As a result, they were able to create a five-step model predicting the specific circumstances that lead to prosocial engagement. A summary of their model (Latané & Darley, 1970) is shown in Figure 10.2.

■  TABLE 10.4  Team Loyalty of Manchester United Fans

SOURCE: Levine et al. (2005). Copyright by SAGE Publishing.

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People are more likely to help if the answer is “yes” to each of the following five questions:

■  FIGURE 10.2  Latané and Darley’s five-step model of helping.

SOURCE: Latané & Darley (1970).

Step 1: Notice the Event.  Of course, to help, you must first realize that help is needed. People might fail to help simply because they were distracted or weren’t paying attention, especially if they were in a hurry (which might be one explanation for the findings of the “Good Samaritan” study described earlier).

Step 2: Interpret the Event as an Emergency.  When Kitty Genovese’s neighbors heard noises at 3:00 a.m. outside their apartment complex, they probably didn’t immediately assume someone was being attacked. Instead, some reported that they simply thought it was a romantic couple having a fight or drunk friends returning from a night on the town. We’re only able to help when we interpret the situation as one in which help is needed.

One reason we might not interpret an emergency as what it really is could be pluralistic ignorance. In Chapter 8, we reviewed pluralistic ignorance as a reason not to speak up with a minority opinion in a group—you think you’re the only person who thinks that way. In situations that might be interpreted as emergencies, we often look around to see if other people are reacting the same way we are. If they don’t appear to be worried, we tell ourselves that everything must be okay after all.

Latané and Darley (1970) demonstrated this when they put participants in a room to complete a survey—then slowly filled the room with smoke. When participants were alone in the room, 75% of them quickly got up to report what was happening. But when three participants were in the room—real participants, not confederates—only 38% of the three-person groups had someone report the smoke within the first 6 minutes of the procedure. In over half of the groups, all three participants sat quietly, even when the smoke was so thick they couldn’t see what they were writing on their surveys. Apparently, these participants felt that if the other two people didn’t think there was a problem, then they didn’t want to look like a fool or a troublemaker.

Step 3: Take Responsibility.  We already know that prosocial behaviors like helping will increase when people feel responsible. This is more likely to be the case when they are alone and no diffusion of responsibility can take place. It also seems to be the case when they feel compelled to help others who are, at least on the surface, similar to them and therefore potentially a member of their ingroup. Emergency training (such as CPR classes) often emphasizes increasing responsibility by instructing people to point to a single person in the room and say, “You! Call 911!” Due to diffusion of responsibility, this will lead to much faster responding than simply yelling, “Someone call 911!”

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Step 4: Knowing How to Help.  Even if we know an emergency is happening and we want to help, we might not be able to do so. Perhaps someone is trapped under something so heavy, we can’t lift it; perhaps someone needs a car mechanic and we’ve never learned those particular skills. Even the most empathetic, agreeable person won’t be able to help in every situation.

Step 5: Implementing the Decision to Help.  Finally, we must decide to actually engage in a helping behavior. We might choose not to do this if we perceive that the costs outweigh the potential benefits. For example, earlier we noted that women may hesitate to help a stranded motorist on a rural road due to fears of being assaulted. When I [Wind] was in high school, a rumor circulated that if you saw another car at night without its headlights on, you shouldn’t flash your own lights to help the other driver. Why not? I was told that certain “dangerous gangs” had decided to drive without lights on purpose and murder the first person who flashed at them. (This was unlikely in the middle of Iowa in the 1980s, but it was troubling enough to keep me from helping by flashing my lights.)

Sometimes, these fears may be justified. Ted Bundy, the famous serial killer, used to pretend to be injured until a young woman offered to help—and then he would choose her to be his next victim (Byrne & Pease, 2003). Intervening can cost lives—just as the White Helmets introduced at the beginning of this chapter can tell you from personal experience. When they decide to help victims of a war by purposely going into an area with terrorists, bombs, and guns, they implement their decision knowing the risk might be high. Of course, first responders, such as police, firefighters, and EMTs, risk their lives every day to help others in emergencies.

The Main Ideas

•    Ironically, helping is less likely when more people are present. This effect can be due to urban overload or to diffusion of responsibility.

•    We are more likely to help people we like and people who are (or appear to be) similar to ourselves.

•    Latané and Darley proposed that helping will only occur when five steps are all in place. To help, a person must notice the situation, interpret it as an emergency, feel responsible, know how to help, and implement the decision.

  CRITICAL THINKING CHALLENGE

•    Imagine that you find yourself in a big city, in need of help. Explain four specific ways that you could increase the chances of getting the help you need, based on concepts from this chapter.

•    Do you think that the “five steps” toward helping outlined in this section are comprehensive? In other words, what steps might be missing from this model? When you are considering whether to help someone else, are there other circumstances or decisions that you make beyond the five identified here?

•    This chapter discussed (1) general helping motives, (2) how different kinds of people are more likely to help than others, and (3) situational circumstances that lead to more or less helping. Consider all three factors and determine how important you think each one is, relative to the others, in terms of how much it influences helping. If you had 100 “points” that you could assign to these three factors, with more points indicating a stronger influence, how would you distribute those points?

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CHAPTER SUMMARY

What motivates people to help others, in general?

Prosocial behavior is the general term for helping others. Social psychology differentiates between pure altruism, which is helping purely out of selfless concerns, versus egoistic altruism, which is helping that leads to some kind of personal benefit. There are four major theoretical explanations for why people engage in prosocial behaviors; the first three are all considered egoistic explanations, while only the last idea is considered a pure altruistic explanation.

The first theoretical explanation for helping is that prosocial behaviors evolved as a way for individuals to promote their own genes in future generations. Kinship selection shows that helping goes up with people who share more of our genes, such as immediate family members. However, we also help people in our community when prosocial behaviors strengthen the entire group. This kind of exchange system has been shown in several species.

Social norms also promote helping; two examples are belief in a just world and the social responsibility norm, or the idea that each individual has a duty to improve the world by helping those in need. The third explanation for egoistic helping is called the negative state relief model. This model suggests that we help to avoid feeling guilt or other negative emotions we might experience if we fail to help.

The true altruism explanation for helping is encompassed in the final explanation, called the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Here, research shows that we can help due to purely empathetic or compassionate motives if we (1) feel empathy, (2) are capable of helping, (3) perceive that our help will actually benefit the other person, and (4) perceive that we are the best person who can help at that moment.

Why do some people help more than others?

This section of the book considered four variables that might have an influence on whether individuals are more or less likely to display prosocial, helping behaviors. The first variable was personality. Several traits have been linked to prosocial behaviors; Machiavellianism is negatively correlated to helping, while agreeableness is positively correlated to helping.

A second variable is religious norms. People motivated by intrinsic religiosity seem to help due to personal needs (egoistic helping), while people motivated by religion as quest seem to help out of empathy to the victim (altruistic helping). A classic study called the “Good Samaritan experiment” showed that priming religion and helping did not seem to have a significant effect on helping in participants but that manipulating the situation in terms of urgency did. Participants who were in a hurry due to feeling urgency on another task were less likely to help someone in need.

Gender has also been examined in terms of prosocial behaviors. Stereotypically masculine traits, called agentic traits, are more self-focused such as being competitive or aggressive. In contrast, stereotypically feminine traits, called communal traits, are more prosocial such as being nurturing and kind to others. Several studies have shown that girls and women are more likely to help than men, but the situation also matters; men are more likely to help when physical strength is needed or when physical danger is a potential outcome of helping. Research shows that over time, however, these gender differences are decreasing.

Finally, research on national culture has also explored differences in helping behaviors. Several studies show that while objective likelihood of helping may not differ across cultures, motives behind that helping may change. For example, people in collectivistic cultures are more likely to help family members, but they are less likely to help strangers.

What circumstances make helping more or less likely?

A famous case study of people supposedly not helping is the Kitty Genovese story, in which a young woman was stabbed to death outside her apartment complex in New York. Newspaper stories reported that up to 37 people heard her cries for help and failed to help. While more recent reports have questioned the validity of these claims, Genovese’s case inspired several years of research on situational effects and how circumstances might make helping behaviors more or less likely.

One well-replicated finding is that ironically, we are less likely to be helped when there are multiple people present. One explanation for this finding in big cities is the urban overload hypothesis, which points out that people in cities avoid strangers simply because they are overwhelmed with the number of people they encounter every day. It would be impossible to help every homeless person in a city, for example. Another explanation is diffusion of responsibility. If multiple people can see that someone is in need of help, each person’s personal feeling of responsibility will go down. They can think, “I don’t need to help because all of these other people can do it.” The decrease in helping with an increase in witnesses to an emergency is sometimes called the bystander effect.

Other research shows that we are more likely to help when we like the person who needs it or when we simply perceive that they are similar to us (and therefore we might be more likely to like them). However, our perceptions of whether others are members of our ingroups (and therefore similar to us) can be manipulated, such as pointing out that they are fans of a different sports team (manipulation of differences) versus pointing out that both people are sports fans in general (manipulation of similarity).

Finally, Latané and Darley created a five-step model to explain the process that needs to occur in order for people to help. They suggest that for anyone to help in a given situation, that person must (1) notice the event, (2) interpret the event as an emergency, (3) take responsibility, (4) know how to help, and (5) implement the decision to help.

THEORIES IN REVIEW

•    Reciprocal altruism

•    Kinship selection

•    Hamilton’s inequality

•    Social responsibility norm

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•    Negative state relief model

•    Empathy-altruism hypothesis

•    Big 5 model of personality

•    Religious norms and religiosity

•    Gender socialization

•    Urban overload hypothesis

•    Bystander effect

•    Latané and Darley model of prosocial engagement

CRITICAL THINKING, ANALYSIS, AND APPLICATION

Identify three specific examples of people making significant sacrifices to help others (at least one of your examples should be nonfiction). For each example, analyze the person’s motives for helping based on the four theoretical explanations from the first section of this chapter (promoting our own genes, social norms, avoiding negative emotions, and pure altruism).

•    Think about the different circumstances in which people are more likely to help—and tie each into one of the helping motives. Are these circumstances going to lead to egoistic or altruistic helping behaviors?

•    Levine etal. (2005) showed that priming people to think about how all soccer fans are good people led participants to help fans of a rival team. How could this simple procedure be used in the real world, to motivate individuals to help those in need such as refugees from other countries?

•    As technology advances and travel to other parts of the world becomes easier, do you think that views of other countries and cultures will change as well? How will these advances in technology influence the likelihood of helping people from other cultures? For example, will citizens of other countries still be considered part of an outgroup, or will the emphasis on being a “global citizen” change how we view others and whether we’re likely to help them?

PERSONAL REFLECTION

Just like in a movie, one time I was on an airplane about to take off when a flight attendant used the speaker system to ask, “Is there a doctor on the airplane? If so, please push your call button now. Another passenger needs your help.” In this situation, I immediately thought of Latané and Darley’s five-step model for emergencies. Step 1 was a yes; everyone on the plane noticed the situation after the announcement. Step 2 was also a yes; we all interpreted the situation as an emergency—we knew the flight attendant wouldn’t have worried us over something small. For me personally, Steps 3 and 4 were more problematic. I would have been happy to take responsibility to help (Step 3) because I assumed there weren’t very many doctors on the flight; it was a fairly small airplane. However, Step 4 is what really got me. While I was, technically, a doctor, I knew of course that the flight attendant wanted a medical doctor, not someone with a PhD in psychology. I knew that in this situation, I didn’t know how to help—so I sat quietly and did nothing. Fortunately, there was a medical doctor on the plane who quickly assessed the passenger who needed help. It turned out that the passenger had simply passed out from being extremely drunk—so drunk that his heart had slowed to a very low rate. Luckily, there was someone else on the plane who could answer “yes” to all five steps toward helping. [WG]

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LO10.1  Explain several general motives for why helping behaviors occur.

prosocial behavior  303

egoistic altruism  304

social exchange theory  305

altruism/pure altruism  304

kinship selection  305

inclusive fitness  305

Hamilton’s inequality  305

reciprocal altruism  306

post hoc matched groups design  307

social responsibility norm  308

negative state relief model  308

empathy-altruism hypothesis  310

LO10.2  Analyze individual differences regarding why some people are more likely to help.

Machiavellianism  312

Big 5 Model  312

moral hypocrisy  315

moral integrity  315

gender socialization  316

agency  316

prosocial moral reasoning  318

communion  316

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LO10.3  Apply psychological concepts regarding what situational variables lead to more or less helping in different settings.

urban overload hypothesis  322

bystander effect  323

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