Table of contents:
- help
- Factors to initiate aid
- Influence of the characteristics of the situation
- Characteristics of the person who needs help
- Ways of helping people
Helping behavior is the main object of research, because it is something observable, while altruism requires making inferences about intentions and motives. The definition of prosocial behavior: A broad category that includes all behavior defined by a specific society as generally beneficial to other people and to the social system.
You may also be interested in: Relationship between attitude and behavior - Social Psychology Index- help
- Factors to initiate aid
- Influence of the characteristics of the situation
- Characteristics of the person who needs help
- Ways of helping people
help
Help has 3 subcategories or can be categorized into three types
- Help: Any action that has the consequence of providing some benefit or improving the well-being of other people. It involves a more specific interaction than prosocial behavior.
- Altruism: More specific still. There are two types of definitions: Social psychologists refer to motivational factors: Category that includes only those helpful behaviors, carried out and intentionally, with the primary purpose of reducing the discomfort of another person. Sociobiologists, ethologists, and evolutionary psychologists allude to the cost-benefit relationship: It includes any helpful behavior that provides more benefits to the recipient than to the one who performs it.
- Cooperation: Two or more people come together to collaborate in obtaining a common goal, which will be beneficial to all those involved. Increases group cohesion and positive interpersonal relationships.
Factors to initiate aid
Characteristics of the situation "Kitty Genovese incident": While a single man attacked and stabbed Kitty Genovese for about 45 minutes, 38 witnesses who witnessed the incident did nothing to prevent it.
- Darley and Latané: Research on the intervention of observers in aid of a person in distress. They tested the effect of the number of observers.
- Hypothesis: The greater the number of observers, the less likely that any of them will help the person in need. (To put it to the test, they did the epileptic seizure experiment.)
- Results: In the condition with more participants, the percentage of subjects who tried to help was lower and, in addition, when some of them did, it took longer to decide. It is known as the "bystander effect. "
- Conclusion: Whether or not to intervene in emergency cases is the result of a decision process that takes place in the individual's mind, and is influenced by a series of situational factors that will incline the decision towards helping or not helping.
Influence of the characteristics of the situation
Decision model. The individual in a situation:
- Do you realize that something is happening ?: The individual has to realize that something is happening. If you don't realize it, you won't do anything. If you notice the event,
- Do you interpret it as an emergency ?: When the situation is ambiguous and the signs do not provide the necessary clues to know what is happening, people turn to social signs (behavior and opinions of others). This is what Deutsch and Gerard call "informational social influence." Darley and Latané's experiments on the room filling with smoke.
Results: They supported the hypothesis of informative social influence.
- 75% of the subjects who were alone came out to warn of the smoke. Only 10% of the subjects who were alone.
- In the condition of the 3 naive subjects, 38% reported. Latané and Darley explained this result (condition of naive subjects) through the concept of "pluralistic ignorance": the 3 subjects needed to know what was happening and what they should do, but none wanted to publicly show their concern.
- This effect is highly context dependent: In contexts where communication with strangers is socially repressed, inhibition will be much greater. The informative social influence increases with the similarity between the observers. Similarity can refer to any attribute that is important in that particular situation. This is what Festinger's "theory of social comparison" postulates.
- Do you interpret it as an emergency ?: The observer must also consider that they have the responsibility to provide help. The inhibiting effect of the presence of other observers has been called "diffusion of responsibility" (it is the one that best explains the passivity of the Kitty Genovese case). (The clarity of the situation and the lack of direct contact between them, made the inhibiting effect of the informative social influence and of pluralist ignorance impossible)
- Do you consider yourself capable of providing help ?: The observer may not provide help because he considers himself incapable or does not know how to act.
- Make the decision to intervene. This decision model is applicable to many other cases that involve longer-term helpful behavior.
Characteristics of the person who needs help
Greater tendency to help: People who we find attractive (not aversive). People like us: They act in a more prosocial way towards people from their own group than towards strangers (nationality, race). It is a cross-cultural phenomenon that occurs with more intensity in collectivist cultures (the differences between in-group and out-group are more marked). The relationship between similarity and helping behavior can also be explained in terms of cost-benefits:
- There are many factors that drive us to help people very different from ourselves. For example: When the costs of not doing so outweigh the benefits, or the costs of providing help. Gaertner and Dovidio: Experimentally studied the relationship between helping behavior and similarity / difference between the victim and the observer. Two variables were manipulated:
- The presence or not of other observers.
- The race of the victim. Assisting a black / white person, with or without observers.
Results: The diffusion effect of responsibility is confirmed, but that of similarity only appears when there are other observers: The subjects alone helped more, but they did not help more the white person but the black person. With other observers, they helped less, but the white person was helped twice as much as the black person.
Explanation: When the subject is alone, the subject's own image would be damaged if he violated his feelings of moral obligation ("personal norms"), refusing to help another person because he was of another race. However, when there are other observers, the responsibility is more diffuse and, the subject can excuse himself in that another will help to discriminate against the victim of another race, without the reason being clearly racism.
This reaction is typical of "aversive racists": Their prejudice against another race is not overt but subtle. The person considers himself free from racial prejudice but unconsciously maintains negative feelings towards individuals of another race.
The similarity between the victim and the observer, can influence the behavior of help through the "process of attribution of responsibility to the victim": The tendency to help is greater if it is considered that the problem of the victim is due to external circumstances. The greater the similarity between observer and victim, the greater the tendency to consider that they are not to blame for what happens to them.
Opposite phenomenon: When the victim resembles us too much, his problem can remind us that the same thing could happen to us, which produces an unpleasant feeling of similarity. There are two mechanisms to fight this: Distortion of the victim's perception, seeing her as different from us. Attribution of responsibility to the victim: assigning negative characteristics such as lack of intelligence or caution.
Ways of helping people
Apart from the characteristics of the situation and those of the victim, the helping behavior is influenced by other more personal factors: the motivation of the aid donor, his perception of costs and benefits, personality traits, etc. Piliavin: Model referring to the considerations of costs and benefits that move the person to help or not. Activation model and reward cost. It aims to predict not only whether or not people will react in a situation that requires help, but also the type of reaction they will manifest. Distinguish between:
- Costs and benefits of helping
- Costs and benefits of not helping.
It is an economic approach to human behavior, which assumes that the individual weighs the pros and cons before acting, and is motivated primarily by his own interest. It is therefore far from altruism, however, self-interest and altruism do not have to be incompatible. What a person does will depend on the balance between the costs of helping or not helping, but:
If both costs are high:
- It will help indirectly by looking for another person who can assist the victim. b
- You will reduce the costs of not helping by reinterpreting the situation: Dissemination strategies of responsibility.
Strategies for attributing responsibility to the victim. The result in both cases will be: Lowering the costs of not intervening. If both costs are low: The situation is more difficult to predict. Other factors gain more weight, such as:
- Social and personal norms.
- Personality differences.
- Relations between observer and victim.
- Other situational variables.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Altruism and Helping Behavior - Social Psychology, we recommend that you enter our category of Social and Organizational Psychology.