VL11 - Prosocial Behaviour

This chapter examined the causes of prosocial behavior, acts performed with the goal of benefiting another person. What are the basic origins of prosocial behavior?

• evolutionary psychology: Instincts and Genes Evolutionary theory explains prosocial behavior in four ways. The first is kin selection, the idea that behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection. The second is the norm of reciprocity, which is the expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future. The third is group selection, the idea that social groups with altruistic mem- bers are more likely to survive in competition with other groups.

• Social exchange: the costs and Rewards of helping Social exchange theory argues that proso- cial behavior is not necessarily rooted in our genes. Instead, people help others in order to maximize social rewards and minimize social costs.

• empathy and altruism: the pure motive for helping People can be motivated by altruism, the desire to help another person even if it involves a cost to the helper. According to the empathy- altruism hypothesis, when people feel empathy toward another person (they experience events and emotions the other person experiences), they attempt to help that person purely for altruistic reasons.

personal Qualities and prosocial Behavior: Why do Some people help more than others? Basic motives are not all there is to understanding prosocial behavior—personal qualities matter as well.

• Individual differences: the altruistic personality Although some people have altruistic personali- ties that make them more likely to help others, we need to consider several other critical factors when predicting who will help and who will not.

• Gender differences in prosocial Behavior In many cultures, the male sex role includes helping in chivalrous and heroic ways, whereas the female sex role includes helping in close, long-term relationships.

• cultural differences in prosocial Behavior People are willing to help both in-group and out-group members, but for different reasons. People are more likely to feel empathy toward members of their in-groups who are in need, and the more empathy they feel, the more likely they are to help. People help out-group members for a different reason: They do so when they have something to gain, such as feeling good about themselves or making a good impression on others.

• Religion and prosocial Behavior There is a perva- sive stereotype that religious people are more moral and engage in more prosocial behavior than nonreligious people. When it comes to actual behavior, it is true that religious people are more likely to help than other people are if the person in need of help shares their beliefs, but religious people are not more likely to help strangers. This is an example of in-group favoritism, in that people show preference to in-group members over out-group members. Thus, it may not be religiosity per se that causes people to be more helpful, but rather that people are more helpful toward people who belong to the same groups they do.

• the effects of mood on prosocial Behavior People are more likely to help if they are in especially good moods, but also if they are in especially bad moods.

Situational determinants of prosocial Behavior: When Will people help? To understand why people help others, we also need to consider the nature of the social situation.

• environment: Rural versus urban People are less likely to help in dense, urban settings because of the urban overload hypothesis—the idea that peo- ple living in cities are constantly bombarded with stimulation and that they keep to themselves in order to avoid being overwhelmed by it.

• Residential mobility People who have lived for a long time in one place are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors than are people who have recently moved to an area.

• the number of Bystanders: the Bystander effect To help in an emergency, people must meet five conditions: They must notice the event, inter- pret it as an emergency, assume responsibility, know how to help, and implement their decision to help. As the number of bystanders who witness an emergency increases, the more difficult it is to meet two of these conditions—interpreting the event as an emergency and assuming responsi- bility. This produces the bystander effect: The larger the number of bystanders, the less likely any one of them is to help.

• effects of the media: video Games and music lyrics Playing a prosocial video game or listening to a song with prosocial lyrics makes people more likely to help others in a variety of ways.

how can helping Be Increased? Prosocial behavior can be increased in a number of ways.

• Increasing the likelihood that Bystanders Will Intervene Research shows that teaching peo- ple about the barriers to bystander intervention increases the likelihood that they will help in emergencies. Reminding people of times they acted in uninhibited ways can work as well.

• Increasing volunteerism Organizations that encourage their employees to engage in volunteer work should be careful about how they do so. If people feel that they are volunteering only because they have to, they may actually become less likely to volunteer in the future. Encouraging people to volunteer while preserving the sense that they freely choose to do so has been shown to increase people’s sense of well-being and their intentions to volunteer again in the future.

• positive psychology and prosocial Behavior A new subfield called positive psychology focuses on qualities of the person and seeks to increase human virtues such as empathy and altruism. The social psychological approach, however, holds that helping behavior often depends more on the nature of the social situation than the personalities of the people in that situation.