PSY204 Prosocial behaviour

Acts that are positively viewed by society.

Acts that intentionally benefit someone else.

A special form of helping behaviour, sometimes costly, that shows concern for fellow human beings and is performed without expectation of personal gain.

Views complex social behaviour as adaptive, helping the individual, kin and the species as a whole to survive.

Cooperative behaviour benefits the cooperator as well as others; a defector will do worse than a cooperator.

Those who cooperate are biased towards blood relatives because it helps propagate their own genes; the lack of direct benefit to the cooperator indicates altruism.

Ability to feel another person’s experiences; identifying with and experiencing another person’s emotions, thoughts and attitudes.

In attending to an emergency, the bystander calculates the perceived costs and benefits of providing help compared with those associated with not helping.

Empathetic physiological reaction response. Greater arousal leads to greater helping likelihood.

The view championed by Bandura that human social behaviour is not innate but learnt from appropriate models.

Tendency for a person to reproduce the actions, attitudes and emotional responses exhibited by a real-life or symbolic model. Also called observational learning.

Acquiring a behaviour after observing that another person was rewarded for it.

According to Lerner and Miller, people need to believe that the world is a just place where they get what they deserve. As evidence of undeserved suffering undermines this belief, people may conclude that victims deserve their fate.

People who feel good are much more likely to help someone in need than are people who feel bad.

People who scored high on the attributes of agreeableness, self-transcendence values, empathic self-efficacy, ability to forgive, and capacity to feel embarrassed were more likely to engage in prosocial behaviour.

Descriptions of the nature of people’s close relationships, thought to be established in childhood.

People from small-town backgrounds were more likely to help than those from larger cities.

Often involves an unusual event, can vary in nature, is unplanned and requires a quick response.

People are less likely to help in an emergency when they are with others than when alone. The greater the number, the less likely it is that anyone will help.

The idea that we should help people who are dependent and in need. It is contradicted by another norm that discourages interfering in other people’s lives.

This occurs when an individual breaks out of the role of a bystander and helps another person in an emergency.

A theory proposing that the presence of others can inhibit people from responding to an emergency: the more people, the slower the response.

Do we even notice an event where helping may be required, such as an accident?

How do we interpret the event?

Do we accept personal responsibility for helping?

What do we decide to do?

Explanations for why people tend not to help when in a group.

Tendency of an individual to assume that others will take responsibility (as a result, no one does). This is a hypothesised cause of the bystander effect.

The dread of acting inappropriately or of making a foolish mistake witnessed by others. The desire to avoid ridicule inhibits effective responses to an emergency by members of a group.