Ch. 14 - Prosocial Behaviour

Question 1

Casual helping
Emergency helping
Emotional helping
Substantial personal helping

Answer 1

Low cost, stranger
High cost, stranger
Low cost, close other
High cost, close other

Question 2

Factors influencing casual helping (6)

Answer 2

Social norms
Presence of helpful model
Perceived responsibility of victim
Positive mood
Embarrassment
Identifiability of victim

Question 3

Social norms

Answer 3

Norm of social responsibility = should help others who need it
Norm of reciprocity = quid pro quo exchange

Question 4

Presence of helpful model (study example)

Answer 4

Study with broken down car, with model of someone fixing a car on the same road

Question 5

Perceived responsibility of victim

Answer 5

Lerner’s just world theory = believe that people get what they deserve
When we encounter a suffering victim, our belief that the world is just is threatened so we are motivated to restore our threatened beliefs by either helping, blaming, or ignoring the victim

Question 6

Positive mood

Answer 6

We tend to be more helpful when we are in a good mood

Question 7

Embarrassment (study example)

Answer 7

When male confederate dropped a mitten v.s. a box of condoms

Question 8

Identifiability of victim

Answer 8

Identifiable victim effect = tendency for people to eagerly help a single victim while ignoring the sufferings of victims of a large scale tragedy

Question 9

Substantial personal helping - kin selection theory

Answer 9

We increase the changes of our genes being passed on to subsequent generations by helping our genetic relatives prosper
In a hypothetical life or death scenario, participants report that they would save relatives with greater genetic overlap

Question 10

By stander effect
Causes (2)
How to overcome

Answer 10

Likelihood of a person helping in an emergency decreases as the number of bystanders increase
Due to pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility
Can overcome this by singling people out to help and telling them what to do

Question 11

Decision tree of helping (5)

Answer 11

Darley and Latane

1. Notice the event
2. Interpret the event as an emergency (obstacle is pluralistic ignorance)
3. Accept personal responsibility (obstacle is diffusion of responsibility)
4. Decide how to help (obstacle is not feeling competent)
5. Actually help (obstacle is audience inhibition)

Question 12

Altruistic perspective of helping

Empathy altruism hypothesis

Answer 12

Batson: motivation for helping others is solely to offer aid to that person

Feelings of empathy for a target can motivate purely altruistic acts, meaning that costs to helping shouldn’t matter

Question 13

Egotistic perspective of helping

Negative state relief hypothesis

Answer 13

Cialdini: motivation for helping others is to gain rewards and avoid punishments for ourselves

People help others to alleviate their own distress

Question 14

Arousal/cost reward model of helping

Answer 14

Piliavin: both empathy for someone and motivation to alleviate personal distress can increase the likelihood of helping a person

To increase likelihood of helping, 3 conditions must be met after we experience negative emotional arousal from seeing someone in need

• arousal is strong
• we connect to the victim
• the cost:reward ratio is small

Question 15

How to socialize altruism (5)

Answer 15

Teaching moral inclusion
Modelling altruism
Attributing helpful behaviour to altruistic motives
Increase awareness of barriers to helping
‘Virtuous authority’ experiment

Question 16

Culture and altruism
Social class and altruism
Religion and altruism (study example)

Answer 16

More altruism in rural areas

• diversity hypothesis: people may help less in urban areas because they are less similar to others
• urban environment has constant high stimulation, so your senses narrow
• more reputational concerns in rural areas because people know one another

Relative scarcity of resources lead lower class people to be more empathetically attuned to others and to build stronger relationships with others to counter threats in the environment

Religion/ethics/fairness words all primed the participants to be more generous compared to neutral words

Question 17

Prisoner’s dilemma

Answer 17

Situation involving payoffs of 2 people who must decide whether to cooperate or defect, in the end trust and cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defection

Question 18

Reputation

Answer 18

Collective beliefs/evaluations/impressions people hold about an individual within a social network
We tend to interact with people when we know their reputation

Question 19

Construal process and cooperation (prisoner’s dilemma)

Answer 19

In a version of the prisoner’s dilemma game, half the participants were told it was called the Wall Street game and the other half was told it was called the Community game → latter group cooperated twice as much in opening round as former group

Question 20

Culture and cooperation

Answer 20

Biggest determining factor is extent to which individuals in a culture depend on one another to survive

Question 21

Tit for tat strategy

Why it’s a compelling strategy (5)

Answer 21

Strategy in prisoner’s dilemma game in which the player’s first move is cooperative, and thereafter the player mimics the other person’s behaviour (whether cooperative or competitive)

It’s cooperative and thus encourages mutually supportive action towards a single goal
It’s not envious → can do well using this without resorting to competitive behaviour
It’s not exploitable → you can’t be easily taken advantage of
It’s forgiving → willing to cooperative at the first cooperative action of the partner
It’s easy to identify that the strategy is being used