Helping Flashcards
(13 cards)
Why do we help? contrary to the law of effect (concerning reward and punishment)
altruism - people will in fact help when there is no gain for them
Darwin - brave men often help, if this humans didn’t then this gene would not persist over time, and die off
The selfish gene view (“kin selection”)
Darwin
- survival of the fittest (old)
- survival of the fittest gene (new)
predisposed to help others that share our genes
- identical twins more helpful to one another than fraternal twins are
- during natural disaster, more helpful to family first
Burnstein et al. hypothesis for kin selection
hypothesis
- help family over non
- proportional to relatedness
- young over old
measured in life and death situations
- found these to be true
basic motives underlying prosocial behaviour
social exchange: costs and rewards of helping
- desire to maximise outcome, minimise cost
helping can be rewarding because:
- increases reciprocity
- relieves personal distress
- gains social approval
- self-worth
reciprocity norm: sometimes does occur between unrelated organisms
Empathy and Altruism, hypothesis for “self-less” motivations
Dan Batson
- when we feel empathy we will attempt for help purely altruistic reasons
contrasts egoistic help: instrumental goal is reason for help to get ultimate goal
Batson et al.
- homeless by responsibility or not
- group they’re supposed to be empathetic towards they had more attitudes towards homeless in general
- empathy increased positivity of attitudes towards people with AIDs and a murderer, reciprocal resultsA
Alternative explanations for altruism
aversive arousal reduction
- help to get rid of unpleasant empathic distress that co-occurs with empathy
empathy specific punishment
empathy specific reward
Empathy and stroop effects
manipulated low or high empathy
- assessed through accessibility using stroop task, name colour of ink of words as quickly as possible
- words were punishment or victim relevant
- when high in empathy, there is a correlation between colour named latency for victim words and helping
- replicated for reward relevant words
Gender and helping
- women are perceived as kinder, more soft hearted
- but over 90% hero awards go to men
- women more likely to help people they know, men strangers
Gender differences in receiving help
- male helpers more likely to help women than men
- male helpers equally likely to help
- women seek and receive more help
cultural difference of helping
more likely to help ingroup, collectivist more likely to help ingroup over outgroup, more so than individualists
Effect of mood on prosociality
good mood more likely to help
- helping prolongs mood
- mood increases self-attention, behave according to beliefs
negative state relief hypothesis
alleviate own sadness/stress through help
how to increase help
prosocial role models
- students who head lecture on bystander intervention more likely to help in staged emergencies 2 weeks later
43% helped when head lecture, 25% helped without having heard it
