Chapter 10 - Prosocial Behaviour Flashcards
Why do people help?
-Prosocial behaviour is any act performed with the goal of benefiting another person.
-Altruism is behaviour aimed at helping others where there is no expectation of reward.
-Altruism can also be self-sacrificing in cases when the behaviour can be detrimental to the self (all altruistic behaviour is prosocial, not all prosocial behaviour is altruistic).
How do instincts and genes (evolutionary psychology) impact us?
-Kin selection: behaviour that helps a genetic relative is favoured by natural selection.
–people are more likely to help genetic relatives than non-relatives in emergency situations.
-The norm of reciprocity: the expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood they will help us in the future.
–reciprocity can already be detected in infants as young as 21 months.
-Learning social norms: learners of societal norms have a competitive advantage and are more likely to survive.
–the ability to learn social norms has become part of our genetic makeup.
What is the Negative-state relief hypothesis?
-the idea that people help in order to alleviate their own sadness and distress.
-they also help in anticipation that they will feel distressed after the event IF they don’t help.
What is empathy and altruism?
-Empathy: the ability to experience events and emotions the way another person experiences them.
-Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: the idea that when we feel empathy for a person, we will attempt to help them purely for altruistic reasons, regardless of what we have to gain.
-when Toi and Batson manipulated empathy levels to determine its impact on helping behaviour, they found that:
–in the low empathy condition, people helped when it benefitted them.
–in the high empathy condition, people helped regardless of the costs or benefits.
What is Altruistic Personality?
-the aspects of a person’s makeup that are said to make them likely to help others in a wide variety of situations.
What is bystander intervention (the Latané and Darley Model)?
-Bystander Effect: the greater the number of bystanders who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them will help.
-Latané & Darley showed that:
–people go through five decision-making steps before they help someone in an emergency.
–if bystanders fail to take any one of the five steps, they will not help.
What are the five decision-making steps of the Latané and Darley Model?
-Noticing an event
-Interpreting the event as an emergency
-Assuming responsibility
-Knowing an appropriate form of assistance
-Implementing the decision to help
What is Pluralistic Ignorance and Diffusion of Responsibility (the Latané and Darley Model)?
-Pluralistic Ignorance: the phenomenon whereby bystanders assume that nothing is wrong in an emergency because no one else looks concerned.
-Diffusion of Responsibility: each bystander’s sense of responsibility to help decreases as the number of witnesses to an emergency or crisis increases.
How to increase the likelihood that bystanders will intervene?
-teaching people about the bystander effect and determinants of prosocial behaviour:
–makes them more aware of why they sometimes don’t help.
–leads them to help more in the future.
