CHAPTER 10

Helping Others

DETAILED OVERVIEW

EVOLUTIONARY AND MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS: WHY DO PEOPLE HELP?

Evolutionary Factors in Helping

• Evolutionary perspectives emphasize two ways that helping could become an innate, universal
behavioral tendency: kin selection, in which individuals protect their own genes by helping
close relatives, and reciprocal altruism, in which those who give also receive.
• Various primates have been observed to show some relatively elaborate examples of
reciprocal altruism and cooperation.

The Evolution of Empathy

• Empathy involves understanding the emotional experience of another individual and
experiencing the emotion consistent with what the other is feeling.
• Recent work examines how seemingly higher-order, uniquely human constructs such as
morality and empathy are evolved characteristics.
• Many primates seem to exhibit empathy both in laboratory and natural settings.

Rewards of Helping: Helping Others to Help Oneself

• People are much more likely to help when the potential rewards of helping seem high relative
to the potential costs.
• Helping others often makes the helper feel good, can relieve negative feelings such as guilt,
and is associated with better health. Long-term or high-risk helping, however, can be costly to
the health and well-being of the helper.
• People who are feeling bad may be inclined to help others in order to feel relief from their
negative mood.
• Some situations call to mind norms that promote particular kinds of self-sacrificing, helpful
behaviors.

Altruism or Egoism: The Great Debate

• Scholars have debated whether egoistic motives are always behind helpful behaviors or
whether helping is ever truly altruistic.

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350 CHAPTER 10

• According to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, taking the perspective of a person perceived

to be in need creates the other-oriented emotion of empathic concern, which in turn
produces the altruistic motive to reduce the other’s distress.
• A number of studies have supported the empathy–altruism hypothesis, for example, by
demonstrating that when people are altruistically motivated, they will help even when
escaping from the helping situation is easy. However, there are limits to the role of altruism in
helping behavior.
• Longer-term acts of helping, such as volunteerism, reflect both altruistic and egoistic
motivations. Self-interested goals in this context can be a good thing because they promote a
commitment to helping behavior to the extent that such goals are met.

Helping as a Default?

• Research by David Rand and colleagues has found that being helpful and cooperative with
others is the sensible way to act much of the time.
• Our default inclination may prime us to be helpful.

SITUATIONAL INFLUENCES: WHEN DO PEOPLE HELP?

The Bystander Effect

• Research on the bystander effect, in which the presence of others inhibits helping in an
emergency, indicates why the five steps necessary for helping—noticing, interpreting, taking
responsibility, deciding how to help, and providing help—may not be taken.
• The distractions caused by the presence of other people and by our own self-concerns may
impair our ability to notice that someone needs help.
• The presence of others can make bystanders less likely to interpret a situation as an
emergency, possibly through the pluralistic ignorance created by everyone trying to appear
unconcerned.
• People may fail to take responsibility because they assume that others will do so—a
phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.
• Bystanders are less likely to offer direct aid when they do not feel competent to do so.
• Even if people want to help, they may not do so if they fear that behaving in a helpful fashion
will make them look foolish.
• The bystander effect occurs even in online contexts, when the bystanders are not physically
present.
• The legacy of the bystander effect research and of the Kitty Genovese tragedy that inspired it
endures, even as revisions are suggested to some of the research conclusions or to some of
the details of the Genovese case.

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 HELPING OTHERS 351

• The bystander effect has been examined in the context of understanding problems such as
sexual assault, bullying, and animal abuse, and it has inspired numerous intervention
programs.

Time Pressure
• When people are in a hurry, they are less likely to notice or choose to help others in need.

The Legacy of the Bystander Effect Research

• The bystander effect involves three steps. The first step is noticing, second step is interpreting,
and the third step is the diffusion of responsibility.
• One important application of the research on the bystander effect is in the world of
electronics-based communication.
• Under some conditions, the effect is likely to occur or may even be reversed.

Moods and Helping

• A good mood increases helpfulness.
• People in a good mood may help in order to maintain their positive mood or because they
have more positive thoughts and expectations about helpful behavior, about the person in
need, or about social activities in general.
• A bad mood can often increase helpfulness, for example, when people feel guilty about
something.
• People in a bad mood may be motivated to help others in order to improve their mood.
• A bad mood is less likely to increase helpfulness if the bad mood is attributed to the fault of
others or if it causes the person to become very self-focused.

Prosocial Media Effects

• Playing video games featuring prosocial content and watching prosocial television are both
associated with increased prosocial behavior.

Role Models and Social Influence

• Observing a person modeling helpful behavior increases helping.
• Social norms that promote helping are based on a sense of fairness or on standards about
what is right.

PERSONAL INFLUENCES: WHO IS LIKELY TO HELP?

Are Some People More Helpful Than Others?

• There is some evidence of relatively stable individual differences in helping tendencies.

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352 CHAPTER 10

• Recent findings suggest that there may be a genetic, heritable component to helpfulness.

What Is the Altruistic Personality?

• Some personality traits are associated with helpful behavioral tendencies in some situations,
but no one set of traits appears to define the altruistic personality.
• Qualities that do predict helping behaviors are agreeableness, humility, empathy, and
advanced moral reasoning.

Culture and Helping

• Cross-cultural research has found variation in the helping rates of people in cities around the
world. According to one study, people in cities with relatively low levels of economic well-
being were somewhat more likely to help strangers, and people from simpatía cultures were
more likely to help strangers than people from non-simpatía cultures.
• Research concerning the relationship between individualism–collectivism and helping has
yielded rather mixed results. According to some analyses, collectivists may be more
responsive than individualists to the immediate needs of a particular person but less helpful in
more abstract situations.

INTERPERSONAL INFLUENCES: WHOM DO PEOPLE HELP?

Perceived Characteristics of the Person in Need

• Attractive individuals are more likely to receive help than are those who are less attractive.
• People are more willing to help when they attribute a person’s need for assistance to
uncontrollable causes rather than to events perceived to be under the person’s control.

A Little Help for Our Friends, and Others Like Us

• People in a communal relationship feel mutual responsibility for each other’s needs; people in
an exchange relationship are more likely to keep track of how reciprocal the relationship is in
terms of costs and benefits.
• In general, perceived similarity to a person in need increases the willingness to help.
• People are more likely to help members of their ingroups.
• Research on the role of race in helping has yielded inconsistent results.

Gender and Helping

• Men help strangers in potentially dangerous situations more than women do; women help
friends and relations with social support more than men do. The evidence for gender
differences is not strong for acts of helping that do not easily fit either of these categories.
• Compared to women, men are more hesitant to seek help, especially for relatively minor
problems.

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 HELPING OTHERS 353

Culture and Who Receives Help

• Some research has shown that people with a collectivistic orientation may be less likely to
help outgroup members or strangers than are those with an individualistic orientation.
• A study shows that the Asian and Asian American students tend to be more hesitant to seek
social support than European Americans, and when they do receive social support, they tend
to find receiving it more stressful. Asian and Asian American students may prefer social
support that is more implicit than explicit.

The Helping Connection

• Theory and research seem to indicate that helping requires the recognition of meaningful
connections among individuals.

KEY TERMS
altruistic empathy pluralistic ignorance
audience inhibition empathy–altruism hypothesis prosocial behaviors
bystander effect identity fusion reciprocal altruism
diffusion of responsibility kin selection reluctant altruism
egoistic negative state relief model

© 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part, except for use as
permitted in a license distributed with a certain product or service or otherwise on a password -protected website for classroom use.