Pro Social Behavior

PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Aims
To introduce psychological aspects of prosocial behaviour
Objectives
• Describe different types of helping behaviour
• Discuss different explanations of helping behavior: Why do we help?
• Evaluate the Bystander Intervention Model
Prosocial Behavior:
This discusses the basics of helping behavior. Altruism is distinguished from prosocial behavior. Several theoretical perspectives on helping are considered. These include the evolutionary perspective; the socio-cultural perspective (focusing on social norms of responsibility, reciprocity, social justice); the learning perspective (modeling and reinforcement); Latané and Darley’s decision-making perspective (perceiving a need, taking personal responsibility, weighing the costs and benefits, deciding to help and taking action); and attribution theory’s perspective (focusing on our willingness to help those who deserve help because we attribute their problems to causes out of their control). Factors that influence a potential helper’s likelihood of actually helping are considered, including mood, empathy and personal distress, personality characteristics, and gender. More specific situational factors that influence the decision to help are also discussed, including the bystander effect (and explanations for it), environmental conditions, and time pressures.

Definitions
Prosocial behavior, or "voluntary behavior intended to benefit another" consists of actions which "benefit other people or society as a whole,"such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering." These actions may be motivated by empathy and by concern about the welfare and rights of others, as well as for egoistic or practical concerns. Evidence suggests that prosociality is central to the well-being of social groups across a range of scales. Empathy is a strong motive in eliciting prosocial behavior, and has deep evolutionary roots.
Prosocial behavior fosters positive traits that are beneficial for children and society. It may be motivated both by altruism and by self-interest, for reasons of immediate benefit or future reciprocity. Evolutionary psychologists use theories such as kin-selection theory and inclusive fitness as an explanation for why prosocial behavioral tendencies are passed down generationally, according to the evolutionary fitness displayed by those who engaged in prosocial acts. Encouraging prosocial behavior may also require decreasing or eliminating undesirable social behaviors.
Although the term "prosocial behavior" is often associated with developing desirable traits in children, the literature on the topic has grown since the late 1980s to include adult behaviors as well.

Prosocial Behavior: Prosocial Behavior refers to the phenomenon of people helping each other with no thought of reward or compensation. You may have thought this didn't exist, but it's been known to happen. Prosocial behaviors are actions or patterns of behavior rather than motivations. The motivation to do charitable acts is called altruism. For example, if a person gives an unmarked box of clothing to a shelter anonymously, the action of giving the box is the prosocial behavior. The person's motivation to give the box would be altruism.

All of us have experience of helping and being helped by others. Sometime our prosocial behavior involves little cost, while on other times it involves money, effort, or time. Two kinds of helping behavior exist with different motives. Nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte maintained that egoistic help is based on egoism; in which the person wants something in return. On the other hand altruistic help is for another person’s welfare. Prosocial, egoistic and altruistic behaviors are distinguished below from each other:

Prosocial Behavior: Voluntary behavior that is carried out to benefit another person
Egoistic helping: A form of helping in which the ultimate goal of the helper is to increase one’s own welfare
Altruistic helping: means helping someone when there is no expectation of a reward
Types of Helping (McGuire, 1994)
• Casual help, e.g., giving directions
• Substantial help, e.g., lending money
• Emotional help, e.g., listening
• Emergency help, e.g., saving someone, helping in crisis
Explanations of helping behavior: Why do we help?

Social Exchange Theory
All relationships have give and take, although the balance of this exchange is not always equal. Social Exchange theory explains how we feel about a relationship with another person as depending on our perceptions of:
The balance between what we put into the relationship and what we get out of it.
The kind of relationship we deserve.
The chances of having a better relationship with someone else. In deciding what is fair, we develop a comparison level against which we compare the give/take ratio. This level will vary between relationships, with some being more giving and others where we get more from the relationship. They will also vary greatly in what is given and received. Thus, for example, exchanges at home may be very different, both in balance and content.
We also have a comparison level for the alternative relationships. With a high such comparison level, we might believe the world is full of lovely people just waiting to meet us. When this level is low, we may stay in a high-cost relationship simply because we believe we could not find any better elsewhere.
• An Evolutionary perspective
• A Sociocultural Perspective: Norms of reciprocity, social responsibility, social justice
• A Learning Perspective
Helping is Consistent with Evolutionary Theory
Sometime we help for some personal gain, while on other times we help without any personal motive. Not only human beings, but many examples of prosocial behavior have been observed among animal species, e.g., dolphins, lions, chimpanzees, etc. One principle of evolutionary theory is that any social behavior that enhances reproductive success (the conception, birth, and survival of offspring) will continue to be passed on from one generation to the next. However, to reproduce, an animal must first survive. Taken together, there may be mechanisms for the genetic transmission of helpful inclinations from generation to generation.
Evolutionary theorists contend that it is not only personal survival that is important. Rather it is a gene survival that promotes reproductive fitness.
“Kin selection” provides an explanation for gene survival:
• There is a preference for helping blood relatives because this will increase the chances for the helper’s genes to pass on to successive generations. Because your blood relatives share many of your same genes, by promoting their survival you can also preserve your genes even if you don’t survive the helpful act. This principle of kin selection states that you will exhibit preferences for helping blood relatives because this will increase the odds that your genes will be transmitted to subsequent generations.
• Animals help others more who are genetically related. But People also help non-relatives. How this becomes possible? This is explained by Trivers (1983) in the next perspective on prosocial behavior explanations.
A Socio-cultural Perspective: Social Norms Reciprocal helping:
According to this principle, people are likely to help strangers if it is understood that the recipient is expected to return the favor at some time in future. Trivers (1983) believes that reciprocal helping is most likely to evolve in a species when certain conditions exist. Three of these conditions are:
• Social group living, so that individuals have ample opportunity to give and receive help.
• Mutual dependence, in which species survival depends on cooperation, and
• The lack of rigid dominance hierarchies, so that reciprocal helping will enhance each animal’s power. Considerable research supports both kin selection and reciprocal helping among humans and other animals. For example, when threatened by predators, squirrels are much more likely to warn genetically related squirrels with which they live than unrelated squirrels or those from other areas. Similarly, across a wide variety of human cultures, relatives receive more help than non-relatives, especially if the help involves considerable costs, such as being a kidney donor (Borgida et al., 1992). Reciprocal helping is also common in humans, and, consistent with evolutionary-based mechanisms to prevent cheating, when people are unable to reciprocate, they tend to experience guilt and Figure 1 illustrates the power of reciprocity: shame. Three social norms that serve as guidelines for prosocial behavior deal with reciprocity, responsibility, and justice. The first of these prosocial norms, the norm of reciprocity, is based on maintaining fairness in social relationships. This norm prescribes that people should be paid back for whatever they give us. This norm also explains the discomfort that people typically experience when they receive help but cannot give something back in return.
Norm of responsibility:
In comparison to the reciprocity norm, the other two prosocial norms dictate that people should help due to a greater awareness of what is right. For instance, the norms states that we should help when others are in need and dependent on us. Acting on this norm, adults feel responsible for the health and safety of children, teachers have a sense of duty and obligation to their students, and police and fire-fighters believe they must help even at the risk of their own lives. This social responsibility norm requires help-givers to render assistance regardless of the recipient’s worthiness and without an expectation of being rewarded.
Norm of social justice: In contrast to the dependent-driven social responsibility norm, the norm of social justice stipulates that people should help only when they believe that others deserve assistance. People become entitled to the deserving label by either possessing socially desirable personality characteristics or by engaging in socially desirable behaviors. Thus, according to the social justice norm, if “good” people encounter unfortunate circumstances, they deserve our help and we have a duty to render assistance. A Learning Perspective
Observational learning in children:
According to social learning theorists, observational learning or modeling can influence the development of helping in at least two ways (Rosenkoetter, 1999; Rushton, 1980). First, it can initially teach children how to engage in helpful actions. Second, it can show children what is likely to happen when they actually engage in helpful (or selfish) behavior. In this learning process, what models say and what they do both shape the observers’ prosocial behaviors. For example, in one study, sixth-grade girls played a game to win chips that could be traded for candy and toys (Midlarsky et al,, 1973). Prior to actually playing, each of the girls watched a woman play the game. In the charitable condition, the adult put some of the chips she won into a jar labeled “money for poor children” and then urged the girl to think about the poor children who would “love to receive the prizes these chips can buy.” In the selfish condition, the adult model also urged the child to donate chips to the poor children, but she did so after putting all her chips into a jar labeled “my money.” Results indicated a clear effect of prosocial modeling. Girls who had observed the charitable model donated more chips to the poor than those who had seen the selfish model.
Prosocial modeling in adults:
Modeling prosocial behavior is not confined to children. In one study conducted in a natural setting, motorists who simply saw someone helping a woman change a flat tire were more likely to later stop and assist a second woman who was in a similar predicament (Bryan & Test, 1967). In another experiment (Rushton & Campbell, 1977), female college students interacted with a friendly woman as part of a study on social interaction (this was not the true purpose, and the woman was a confederate of the researchers). When the fabricated study was completed, the two women left the lab together and passed a table staffed by people asking for blood donations. When participants were asked first, only 25% agreed, and none actually followed through on their pledge six weeks later. However, when the confederate was asked first and signed up to donate blood, 67% of the participants also agreed to give blood, and 33% actually fulfilled their commitment.
Modelling helping behaviour
Figure 2 more clearly illustrates the findings of this study:

Rewarding prosocial behavior:
Although observing the prosocial actions of others can shape children’s and adults’ own helping, the consequences of their actions will often determine whether they continue to engage in prosocial behavior.
Social rewards, such as praise, are generally more effective reinforcers than material rewards, such as money (Grusec, 1991). In one such experiment
Confederate
Children were first induced to behave generously by first asked first having generosity modeled to them as in the previously described game-token studies. When the children donated some of their winnings to an orphan named Bobby, the model either praised the child for his or her imitative generosity (reward condition) by saying “Good for you, that’s really nice of you,” or scolded the child (punishment condition) by saying “That’s kind of silly for you to give to Bobby. Now you will have fewer tokens for yourself.” There was also a no-reinforcement condition in which the adult said nothing. As you can see in figure 3, children who were praised gave more to Bobby on later trials than did children who were scolded. The effects of being either rewarded or punished for prosocial behavior were so strong that they still influenced how much the children gave to Bobby two weeks later. The results are demonstrated in Figure 3 Another study demonstrates that verbal praise or scolding by an adult model can either strengthen or weaken children’s level of generosity (Moss & Page, 1972). In the reward condition, the woman asking for directions rewarded her helper by saying, “Thank you very much, I really appreciate this.” In contrast, in the punishment condition the woman responded to help by saying, “I can’t understand what you’re saying, never mind, I’ll ask someone else.” Researchers found that when people were rewarded by the first woman, 90% of them helped the second woman. However, when punished by the first woman, only 40% helped in the later situation. As in the study with children, this adult study suggests that people’s future decisions to help are often influenced by the degree to which current helpful efforts are met by praise or rebuke. When do we help?
On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed on her way back to home. A man stabbed her with knife near her apartment building in New York at 3.20 a.m. Her cries rang out in the night but nobody came for help while at least 38 of her neighbors were watching from the windows. The apathy of her neighbors was the topic of news stories, and people’s dinner conversations. Two people who discussed the murder at length were social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane. Bystander intervention model eventually emerged as a result of these dinner discussions.
Bystander intervention involves a series of decisions
Although people often see people in need of help, they sometimes don’t go and offer it themselves. People decide whether or not to offer assistance based on a variety of perceptions and evaluations. Help is offered only if a person answers “yes” at each step. The bystander intervention model maintains that there are four stages which must be gone through before helping occurs. As it can be seen in Figure 4 given below that at each point in this five-step process, one decision results in no help being given, while the other decision takes the bystander one step closer to intervention. The first thing that you, as a potential helper, must do is notice that something unusual is happening. Unfortunately, in many social settings, countless sights and sounds flood our senses. Because it is impossible to attend to all this stimuli, and because we may be preoccupied with something else, a cry for help could conceivably go completely unnoticed. This stimulus overload effect is more likely to occur in densely populated urban environments than in rural settings (Milgram, 1970). Indeed, it is one of the likely reasons why there is a negative correlation between population density and helping (Levine, 2003). Another reason is that sometimes it is difficult to notice things out of the ordinary as what is unusual in one setting may be a normal occurrence in another. As a bystander to an emergency, if you do indeed notice that something unusual is happening you move to the second step in the decision-making process: deciding whether something is wrong and help is needed. Returning to the previous example, if you pass by an unconscious man on the sidewalk you may ask yourself, “Did he suffer a heart attack or is he merely sleeping. When you define the situation as an emergency, the bystander intervention model states that the third decision you must make is determining the extent to which you have responsibility to help. According to Latane and Darley, one factor that may play a role in your decision to help or not is whether an appropriate authority figure is nearby. Let’s continue this hypothetical emergency situation, but now imagine that there is no police car in sight. Faced with the reality of a clear emergency, you still may not help if you convince yourself that all the other motorists watching this incident could help just as well as you. The presence of these other potential helpers, like the presence of authority figures, may cause you to feel less personally responsible for intervening. If, however, you assume responsibility for helping, a fourth decision you must make is the appropriate form of assistance to render. But in the heat of the moment, what if you are not sure what to do? You may become paralyzed with uncertainty about exactly how to render assistance. Finally, if you notice something unusual, interpret it as an emergency, assume responsibility, and decide how to help, you still must decide whether to implement your course of prosocial action.
Reading
• Franzoi, S. (2003). Social Psychology. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Chapter 14.
References:
• Lord, C.G. (1997). Social Psychology.Orlando: Harcourt Brace and Company. Chapter 8.
• David G. Myers, D. G. (2002). Social Psychology (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Taylor, S.E. (2006). Social Psychology (12th ed.). New York: Prentice Hall.

Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Graduate School
Master in Psychology

Presents:

Pro-social Behavior: A Written Report

In partial fulfillment of the requirements in
Advanced Social Psychology

Submitted by:
Renato B. Mendoza Jr.
MP- Industrial

Submitted to:
Dr. Joey Abat