Chapter 8: Altruism - Helping others Flashcards
What is altruism?
- A motive to increase another’s welfare without conscious regard for one’s self-interests
What does the social exchange theory say about altruism?
- Def: For all interactions of material and social goods, we seek to maximize rewards and minimize costs
- Any human interaction can be looked at through this theory
What’s the natural selection theory for why altruism exists?
- Acts as a genetic survival strategy: Evolution has selected altruism toward one’s close relatives to enhance the survival of mutually shared genes. More likely to help family members to survive (i.e., kin selection)
- Social survival strategy: Helping another because of the expectation that the favour will be returned
What role do social norms play in reciprocity?
- The idea of reciprocity
- The pledging money experiment: Participants were more likely to pledge money when the confederate did them a favour first compared to the confederates that did not do a favour for the participant
- We get something out of following social norms
What two forms of emotions can be generated when we see someone in distress which in turn motivates us to help them?
- Can either feel distress or genuine empathy.
- For distress: more of an egoistic motivation to help them, we want to reduce our own distress
- For empathy: more of an altruistic motivation, doing it to reduce the other’s distress
- These two scenarios are not mutually exclusive
How can attribution theory explain why we help?
- We first consider how the person got into that situation and how responsible they were/ how much control they had
- High control = low sympathy, low control = high sympathy (negatively correlated). This in turn impacts the degree of help-giving
- High sympathy = more help (positively correlated), high anger = less help
What are some of the situational determinants of helping
- Noticing that they need help
- Interpreting the situation and overcoming pluralistic ignorance
- Assuming responsibility of the situation (overcoming diffusion of responsibility
- Helping when someone else does (emulating a helpful model)
- Time pressures
What were the major outcomes of the Smoke-filled Room Experiment?
- Once seeing the smoke, individuals who were alone were more likely to report the smoke in a shorter amount of time
- Those who were in a group delayed reporting the smoke as they took more time to “figure out what to do”.
How does time pressure impact our ability to help others?
- When we are really pressed for time, it significantly reduces our desire to take the time to help others
What sort of personality traits predispose someone to help others?
- Those high in emotionality, those with high empathy, and high in self-efficacy
- Also dependent on how their personality interacts with the situation (ex. high self-monitoring people think they will be socially rewarded)
Are there any gender differences in people’s willingness to help others?
- Men more likely to help in riskier situations while women more likely to help in less risky situations
- Overall, men and women do not differ in helpfulness
How can we increase helping?
- Undo the restraints on helping (reduce ambiguity and increase responsibility; enable guilt for self-image)
- Socialize altruism (teach moral inclusion; model altruism; attribute helping behaviour to altruism; learn about altruism)
What’s moral inclusion?
- The idea that everyone deserves help.
T/F: Good deeds help boost self-worth.
- TRUE
What’s a major weakness of the social exchange theory?
- Easily degenerates into explaining by naming (i.e., they did this because they wanted this)
