Paragons Of Altruism And Motivation

Time and time again, our society feels the need to remind us of the remarkable altruistic deeds of people like Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Florence Nightingale, and also retell the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, our society recognizes that everyone is not cut from the same cloth and capable of performing immense altruistic deeds, but it shares these stories in hopes of encouraging even the smallest acts of kindness and selflessness as we go about in our daily life. Thomas, Baston and Coke explored how paragons of altruism influence motivation for helping and self-perceived altruism. They hypothesize that people who offer help after observing to very helpful people will decrease their self-perceived altruism because subjects will attribute their motivation to help to the extrinsic pressure rather than their own intrinsic altruism.
They designed the experiment in a two by two factorial design. Recruited sixty four students
Furthermore, the moderately helpful and agreed to help group appraised more altruistic behaviors to themselves than the moderately helpful and not asked to help group. However, in the not asked to help conditions, the level of helpfulness of the models had no significant effect.
Results supports the hypothesis according to self perception theory, which says that exposure to paragons of helpfulness and highly altruistic behavior can reduce a significant source of motivation to help, underlying self inclined altruism. The dire implication of this finding is that if the sense of a person’s intrinsic motivation to help others is downplayed due to reduced self-perceived altruism, genuine helpfulness will be discouraged and people will instead rely more on extrinsic pressure, the presence of other helpful models, before showing helpful