PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR

John Mayo EnriquezSarah Jane Omar

WHAT IS PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR?

Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. Prosocial behavior is characterized by a concern about the rights, feelings and welfare of other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy and concern for others and behaving in ways to help or benefit other people

PRO-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR **BENEFITS

Doing something good or someone or society

Building relationships Helping society to function Adding to “social capital”

PRO-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR INCLUDES:

HELPING OTHERS OBEYING RULES CONFORMING to socially

acceptable behavior COOPERATING with others

WHY PRO-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR IS IMPORTANT Culture is more than the sum of its parts (but only if

people cooperate and follow the rules

Ro-Social behavior build relationships

Anti-social behavior destroys relationships

Anti-Social behavior

Doing something bad to someone or society

Damaging relationships

Interferring with society’s functioning

Reducing “social capital”

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Altruism is the desire to help another person even if it involves a cost to the helper.

The Bystander Effect- or bystander apathy, is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present

Pluralistic ignorance is the phenomenon whereby bystanders assume that nothing is wrong in an emergency because no one else looks concerned. This greatly interferes with the interpretation of the event as an emergency and therefore reduces helping

THEORIES OF PRO-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

• Evolutionary• Social Exchange• Empathy-altruism

Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• > Evolutionary Psychology: Instincts and Genes

• Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection.

• Darwin recognized that altruistic behavior posed a problem for his theory: if an organism acts altruistically, it may decrease its own likelihood of surviving to pass on its genes.

1. Kin Selection

• Kin selection is the idea that behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection. Helping a kin member may decrease one’s own probability for survival/passing on one’s genes, but kin share the same genes, so saving a kin member may pass on one’s own genes. Self-reports from people (Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994), and anecdotal evidence from real emergencies (Sime, 1983) show that organisms help more the more closely another is related to them.

2. The Reciprocity Norm

• The norm of reciprocity is the expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future. Sociobiologists suggest that, as humans were evolving, those who were the most likely to survive would be those who developed an understanding with the neighbors based on this norm; they would have been more likely to survive than either completely competitive or completely cooperative people.

3. Learning Social Norms

• • Simon (1990) suggests that those who are the best learners of societal norms have a competitive advantage. Thus people are genetically programmed to learn social norms and one of these norms is altruism.

• • The claims of evolutionary psychologists are still being debated. For example, the theory has difficulty explaining why complete strangers sometimes help each other.

B. Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping

• Social exchange theory argues that much of what we do stems from the desire to maximize our outcomes and minimize our costs. Like evolutionary psychology, it is a theory based on self-interest; unlike it, it does not assume that self-interest has a genetic basis.

Helping can be rewarding because

increases the probability that someone will help us in return

relieves the personal distress of the bystander

gains us social approval and increased self-worth.

• Helping can also be costly (danger, time, money); thus it decreases when costs are high.

C. Empathy and Altruism: The Pure Motive for Helping

• Batson (1991) is the strongest proponent of the idea that people often help purely out of the goodness of their hearts.

• He argues that pure altruism is most likely to come into play when we experience empathy for the person in need; that is, we are able to experience events and emotions the way that person experiences them.

THEORIES OF HELPING• Contact Hypothesis: bringing enemies together

increases understanding.•Equity Theory: we are happiest when give and take are equal.•Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: if we feel empathy we are likely to help.•Identifiable Victim Effect: Empathizing with one more than many.•Love: there are several styles of love.•Politeness Theory: we act politely or rudely depending on whether we care.•Prosocial Behavior: we sometimes help without need for reward.•Social Exchange Theory: perception of relationships depends on fairness perception.•Stockholm Syndrome: becoming attached to captors.•Terminating relationships: relationships break down in stages.  •Reciprocity Norm: we need to return another's favor.

• The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that when we feel empathy for a person, we will attempt to help purely for altruistic reasons, that is, regardless of what we have to gain.

WHEN WILL YOU HELP?.....

WHEN WILL WE HELP?• A theory of helping that explains whether or not bystanders in

an emergency will help in terms of a decision making process• (5 step in decision making)• 1. notice something UNUSUAL happening?(lying on the ground) • 2.Decide something is wrong and HELP is needed? (emergency)

heart attach, rape, theft) • 3.Think you have responsibility in helping? (this is about

determining the extent to which you have responsibility to help) remember if giving responsibility increases HELPING

• 4.Know the appropriate form of help to give? Ex. Heart attack, do you know first aid?

• 5.Decide to implement your form of help? Even if you know what to do, you might end up not taking action

Latane & Darley’s Cognitive Model

• 5 step decision making process:• 1. Do you notice something unusual happening? > YES >• 2. Is the event interpreted as an Emergency? > YES >• 3. Do you think you have the responsibility to help? > YES >• 4.Do you know the appropriate kind of help to give? > YES >• 5. Do you decide to help? > YES!!

• If it’s a NO then DO NOT HELP!

Decision process in Latane & Darley’s cognitive model

Attend to what is

happening

Define event as

emergency

Assume responsibili

ty

Decide what can be done

GIVE HELP!

WHO WILL HELP?..• Based on Gender

• MEN help MORE, MORE likely to help strangers• MORE helpful in broader public sphere, toward strangers and in

emergencies• Help WOMEN MORE than men

• WOMEN are MORE likely to help in NURTURING situations (e.g care-taking for children, emotional support to a friend/s)

• WOMEN likely to help in the family sphere, in close relationships and in situations that require repeated contact however women are MORE LIKELY TO RECEIVE HELP

• SMALL gender differences among children GIRLS bit more helpful than boys.

WHO WILL HELP?...• Personality

• Empathy is feeling sympathy and caring for others• Motivation to reduce other’s distress• (may lead to altruistic helping) Altruistic is the desire to help

another person even if it involves a cost to the helper.

• Personality Distress is our own negative emotions to a person’s plight

• Motivation to reduce our discomfort• (may lead to egoistic helping)

• Remember: People who are in a good mood are more likely to help.

WHO WILL HELP?...• Learning to help:

• Pro social behavior is also LEARNED through OBSERVATION AND DIRECT REINFORCEMENT

• MODELING teaches children to engage in helpful actions• Both what parents say and do are important• Also shows what happens why they engage in helpful behavior

HOW DO WE INCREASE HELPING? Instilling Helpfulness with Rewards & Models

Prosocial behaviour occurs early in life. Even children as young as 18 months frequently help other, eg, trying to make a crying infant feel better.

One powerful way to encourage prosocial behaviour is for parents and others to REWARD such acts with praise, smiles, and hugs, research shows.

We must be careful and not over emphasize the reward aspect because this can lower the intrinsic value of performing the prosocial behaviour, and decrease the probability of acting prosocially in subsequent situations, in the absence of rewards.

We want children to perceive themselves as altruistic people, so that they enhance the intrinsic value of acting prosocially.

A final word. We shouldn’t impose help on everyone we think needs it. NOT everyone wants to be helped.

If being helped means that they appear incompetent, resulting in lowered self-esteem then some people will chose not to accept help__they will often suffer in silence, even at the cost of failing at the task.

We need to make help supportive and non-threatening for it to be most effective.

PERSONAL QUALITIES AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR: WHY DO SOME PEOPLE HELP MORE THAN OTHERS?

A. Individual Differences: The Altruistic Personality• • An altruistic personality consists of the qualities that

cause an individual to help others in a wide variety of situations.

• People’s personality is clearly not the only determinant of helping. Instead, it seems to be that different kinds of people are likely to help in different situations.

• Research has found that the extent to which people are helpful in one situation is NOT highly related to how prosocial they are in another situation.

• It appears that different kinds of people are likely to help in different types of situations.

B. Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior

• --Women are more likely to help those they already know.

• --Men are more likely to help strangers in emergency situations.

Gender differences in receiving help

• Are people more likely to help women or men? Ans. It depends.

• Male helpers are more likely to help women than men. • Female helpers are equally likely to help men and women.

• Women not only receive more help from men, but they also SEEK more help.

Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior

• People across cultures are more likely to help members of their in-group, the group with which an individual identifies as a member, than members of the out-group, a group with which an individual does not identity.

The Effects of Mood on Pro-social Behavior

• People who are in a good mood are more likely to help.

• The ratio is: Positive Mood: Feel good, do good

• Increase in three reasons: good moods make us interpret events in a sympathetic way

helping another prolongs the good mood

good moods increase self-attention and this in turn leads us to be more likely to behave according to our values and beliefs (and most of us value altruism).

AGE

• Young children are LESS likely to help when in a sad mood.

• They have not yet learned that helping another can produce good feelings.

• -Simpson, 2004

HOW YOUR MOOD AFFECT HELPING?

• Sadness: Helping may improve temporary sadness. (But, if we blame others for our bad mood, sadness is not associated with more helping.) Complex association.

• Happiness: May trigger positive thoughts about others. May prolong good mood. Straightforward, consistent association

Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Environments: Rural versus Urban • People in rural areas are more helpful. This effect holds over a wide

variety of helping situations and in many countries.• One explanation is that people from rural settings are brought up to be more

neighborly and more likely to trust strangers, OR it might be that people living in cities are overwhelmed with too much stimulation; if you put them in a calmer environment, they might be just as likely to help.

• Note: An alternative hypothesis, posted by Milgram, is the urban-overload hypothesis, the idea that people living in cities are likely to keep to themselves in order to avoid being overloaded by all the stimulation they receive. The evidence supports the latter hypothesis, finding that where an accident occurs matters more in influencing helping than where potential helpers were born, and that population density is a more potent determinant of helping than is population size.

NATURE OF RELATIONSHIP: Communal versus Exchange Relationships

Communal relationship are those in which people’s primary concern is with the welfare of the other,

exchange relationships are governed by equity concerns. One possibility is that rewards are equally important in the two different types of relationships, but the nature of the rewards is different. Clark and Mills (1993), however, argue that the nature of the relationship is fundamentally different, such that those in communal relationships are less concerned with rewards.

• IN General: we are more helpful towards friends than strangers, and we are more likely to help a partner in a communal relationship than a partner in an exchange relationship; the exception occurs when the other is beating us in a domain that is personally important and thus threatens our self-esteem; in this case, we are more likely to help strangers than friends.

•THANK YOU!