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Summary course 1.1 People in Groups
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PROBLEM 1PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF EMOTION
→ Emotions arise when we encounter a significant stimulus, and this encounter leads to bodily changes that differ by emotion
James-Lange theory of emotion→ the subjective experience of emotion is the awareness of one’s own bodily reactions in the presence of
certain arousing stimuli
- Different emotions provoke different patterns of physiological response
- Emotion begins when we perceive a situation of an appropriate sort, but our perception is purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless,
destitute of emotional warmth. What turns this perception into genuine emotion is our awareness of the bodily changes produced by
the arousing stimuli
Cannon-Bard theory of emotion→ a stimulus elicits an emotion by triggering a particular response in the brain (thalamus) which then causes
both the physiological changes associated with the emotion and the emotional experience itself
- It’s not easy to distinguish the bodily changes associated with different emotions because they are very similar
Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory of Emotion→ the emotional experience results from the interpretation of bodily responses in the context
of situational cues
- Behaviour and physiology are crucial for emotional experience
- Emotion depends on a person’s judgements about why her body and physiology have changed
- Two factors are necessary to feel a specific emotion
- The person must experience the symptoms of physiological arousal (racing heart, perspiration, rapid breathing and tightening
of the stomach)
- The person must make a cognitive interpretation that explains the source of the arousal
- The reactions of people around us help us interpret our own arousal
- When people are unclear about their own emotional states, they sometimes interpret how they feel by watching others (Reisenzein)
- For other people to influence your emotion, your level of physiological arousal cannot be too intense or else it will be experienced as
aversive, regardless of the situation (Maslach, Zimbardo)
Experiment:
1. Group: arousing injection, informed
2. Group: injection, not informed
3. Group: placebo, confederate in waiting room trying to provoke positive or negative
→ Emotions result: uninformed & injection group felt happier or angrier (depending on confederate cues/behaviour)
Affective neuroscience→ field that uses cognitive neuroscience research methods to study emotion and related processes
Passionate Love
- Intense emotional, heart-thumping state of absorption in another person (from thrilling highs to agonizing lows)
- It is fueled by two ingredients:
- A heightened state of physiological arousal
- The belief that this arousal was triggered by the beloved person
- The arousal-love connection can sometimes be obvious, however, at other times, the symptoms (pounding heart, sweaty palms, weak
knees) can be hard to interpret
Emotional lability
Emotions have two distinct components (Schachter)
- State of physiological arousal (does not differentiate among emotions)
- Cognitions (label arousal and determine which emotion is experienced)
Self-perception theory→ Bem’s idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves only by making self-attributions, for example, we infer our own
attitudes from our own behaviour
Excitation transfer→ arousal caused by one stimulus is added to arousal from a second stimulus and the combined arousal is attributed to the
second stimulus→ residual excitement from previous arousing stimulus intensifies later emotional state
- Any emotion arises from 3 things:
a. Learnt behavior
b. Arousal from another source
c. Person’s interpretation of arousal
- Excitation-transfer model (Zillmann)→ the expression of aggression is a function of learned behaviour, some arousal or excitation from
another source, and the person’s interpretation of the arousal state
, - Heightened arousal can often lead us to be more aggressive than we are normally
PROBLEM 2
HELPING BEHAVIOR
→ Why do we sometimes help and sometimes we don’t? It involves a mix of factors, like our personalities and our social environment
→ People fail to analyze/interpret ambiguous situations right away, which leads to failure in helping
→ Evolutionary theory of cooperation: expects helping behavior to occur disproportionately between genetically related or reciprocating
individuals
The Kitty Genovese murder: A woman was on her way home from work when she was attacked in a respectable neighborhood. She screamed
and her attacker, seeing that no one was coming to help, continued attacking. She tried to escape, shouting and crying for help, however, she
was cornered again and stabbed more times and sexually assaulted. The attack lasted about half an hour and none of her neighbors helped
her. The police received an anonymous call half an hour after the attack began, reporting the event but saying he would not give his name
because he didn’t want to be involved. When the police interviewed the area’s residents, 30 people admitted to hearing the screaming.
Prosocial behaviour, helping behaviour and altruism
- Prosocial behaviour→ acts that are positively valued by society
- Has positive social consequences and contributes to the physical or psychological well-being of a person
- Helpful and altruistic
- Acts of charity, cooperation, friendship, rescue, sacrifice, sharing, sympathy and trust
- Helping behaviour→ acts that intentionally benefit someone else
- Subcategory of prosocial behaviour
- Helping is intentional and it benefits another living being or group
- Altruism→ a special for of helping behaviour, sometimes costly, that shows concern for fellow human beings and is performed without
expectation of personal gain
- Subcategory of prosocial behaviour
- Act that is meant to benefit another person rather than oneself
- This suggest that human behaviour is not always selfish
Biology and evolution
- Nature-nurture controversy→ classic debate about whether genetic or environmental factors determine human behaviour. Scientists
usually accept it as a interaction of both
- Biological position→ as humans have innate tendencies to eat and drink, so they have innate tendencies to help others. The question
whether or not altruism is a biological trait has been asked by several (different) scientists
- Evolutionary social psychology→ extension of evolutionary psychology that views complex social behaviour as adaptive, helping the
individual, kin and the species as a whole to survive
- Two reliable explanations of cooperative behaviour in animals and humans (Stevens, Cushman & Hauser)
- Mutualism→ cooperative behaviour benefits the cooperator as well as others, a defector will do worse than a cooperator
- Kin selection→ 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
- Communicative gene (Buck & Ginsburg) → disposes both animals and humans to communicate, including emotional signals that are
important in the maintenance of social bonds and the possibility of prosocial behaviour.
Empathy and arousal
- A common experience before acting prosocially is a state of arousal followed by empathy
- Empathy→ ability to feel another person’s experiences, identifying with and experiencing another person’s emotions, thoughts and
attitudes
Empathy and altruism
- Act is truly altruistic only if people seek to help even when they will no longer be troubled by observing the suffering or another person
- In relation with the Genovese case, the bystanders felt disturbed, but not enough to act, perhaps they couldn’t identify with the victim
- True altruism is most likely to emerge in situations where the potential helper can easily not help
,The Bystander Effect→ one reason people fail to help strangers in distress
- Failure to help is produced by the way people understand the situation (Latané & Darley) → it’s not that they don’t care, but that they
do not understand what should be done because the situation is ambiguous
- In experiments and situations, it’s proven that the larger the group the participant is in, the smaller the chance he will take any action
- If there is a large group where members are strangers, they’re less likely to help, whereas if there is a large group where members are
familiar with each other, helping behaviour is usually encouraged
- Bystander intervention→ occurs when an individual breaks out of the role of a bystander and helps another person in an emergency
- The most influential and thoroughly studied factor that affects prosocial behaviour is whether the potential helper is alone or in the
company of others
- Pluralistic ignorance→ a type of misunderstanding that occurs when members of a group don’t realize that other members share their
perception, therefore, each member wrongly interprets the others’ inaction as reflecting their better understanding of the situation
- Diffusion of responsibility→ each bystander is convinced that someone else will respond to the emergency, someone else will take
responsibility, partly because no one in the group thinks it is up to him to act
- Costs of not helping and benefits of helping
1. Not taking action gives responsibility to someone else to, and if it’s someone you’re familiar with, you may feel uncomfortable
2. There’s likely to be some embarrassment at not helping in an emergency situation, especially if you are with people you’ll see
again
3. Taking action among friends has the benefit of enhancing social recognition and sense of pride
Benefits and Costs of Helping
- The greater the cost of helping and the smaller the cost of not helping, the smaller the chance that a bystander will offer help to someone
in need
- In some situations, the cost lies in physical danger, in others, the cost is simply time and effort
- Some of the benefits of helping are various signs of social approval, as well as avoidance of shame or embarrassment
Calculating whether to help
- Bystander-calculus model→ bystander calculates the perceived costs and benefits of providing help compared to those associated
with not helping (involves body and mind, mixture of physiological and cognitive processes)
- Three stages or sets of calculation
1. Physiologically aroused by another’s distress
2. Laber arousal as an emotion
3. Evaluate consequences of helping
- Empathy costs of not helping→ failing to help can cause distress to a bystander who empathises with a victim’s plight
- Personal costs of not helping→ not helping a victim in distress can be costly to a bystander (self-blame)
- The more similar the victim is to the bystander, the more likely the bystander is to help (Krebs, 1975)
- Similarity causes greater physiological arousal and greater empathy costs of not helping
Perspective talking
- According to Decety & Lamm, the capacity to take the perspective of and empathise with another has evolutionary significance
- Empathetic concern→ element in Batson’s theory of helping behaviour, it includes feelings of warmth, being soft-hearted and having
compassion for a person in need
- Different kinds of empathy lead to different kinds of motivation to help
- Actively imagining how another feels produces empathy, which leads to altruistic motivation
- Actively imagining how you would feel produces empathy, but it also produces self-oriented distress, and involves a mix of
altruism and egoism
- Women tend to be more empathetic than men (Klein & Hodges)
- It is empathy that directs us to respond to the need of another→ it is a vital ingredient in altruism
Learning to be helpful
- A different explanation of helping→ prosocial behaviour is learned, not innate.
- Processes like classic conditioning, instrumental conditioning and observational learning all contribute to being prosocial
- Childhood - critical period for learning→ how we respond to distress in others is connected to the way we learn to share, help and
provide comfort
- Ways in which responses can be learnt:
- Giving instructions→ telling a child what is appropriate establishes an expectation and a later guide for action
- Using reinforcement→ behaviour that is rewarded is more likely to be repeated
- Exposure to models→ watching someone else helping another is a powerful form of learning
- Modelling→ tendency for a person to reproduce the actions, attitudes and emotional responses exhibited by a symbolic model
(observational learning)
- A model showing us how to perform a helpful act reminds us that helping is appropriate, increases our confidence in being able to help
and gives us information about the consequences of helping others (Rushton, 1980)
- Social learning theory→ view championed by Bandura that human social behaviour is not innate but learnt from appropriate models
, - Learning by vicarious experience→ acquiring a behaviour after observing that another person was rewarded for it
Game playing and the media
- Rosenkoetter found that children who watched television comedies that included a moral lesson engaged more frequently in prosocial
behaviour than children who did not, provided they understood the principle involved
- In a study with video games, when the video content was prosocial, the participants acted in more helpful ways, but when it was violent,
they acted in more hurtful ways (Gentile, Anderson, Yukawa, Ihori, Saleem)
The impact of attribution
- A self-attribution can be even more powerful than reinforcement for learning helping behaviour→ young children who were told they
were “helpful people” donated more tokens to a needy child than those who were reinforced with verbal praise, and this effect persisted
over time (Grusec & Redler)
- Just-world hypothesis→ 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 (Lerner & Miller)
- Two factors that can convince a would-be helper (Miller, 1977) and allow us to decide that giving aid “right now” will be effective
1. The victim is a special case rather than one of many
2. The need is temporary rather than persisting
Latané and Darley’s cognitive model
- Emergency situation→ often involves an unusual event, can vary in nature, is unplanned and requires a quick response
- Elements of an emergency situation:
- It can involve danger, for person or property
- It is an unusual event, rarely encountered by the ordinary person
- It can differ widely from nature
- It is not foreseen, so that prior planning of how to cope is improbable
- It requires instant action, so that leisurely consideration of options is not feasible
- Whether a person helps depends on the outcome of a series of decisions
Attend to what is happening + Define event as emergency + Assume responsibility + Decide what can be done → GIVE HELP
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire”
- Latané and Darley invited male students to a room to discuss some problems involved with university. While students were completing
a questionnaire, smoke began to pour from a wall vent and continued for six minutes until it was full of smoke. Participants were either
alone, with two others or with two confederates who completely ignored the smoke.
- Participants who were alone were more likely to report the smoke than those with strangers
- 75% of the participants who were alone took positive action
- 38% of the two-stranger groups intervened
- 10% of the participants who were with the two confederates took action
“A lady in distress”→ Male participants were alone in a room or in pairs filling out a questionnaire and heard a woman in another room struggle
to open a filing cabinet, followed by a loud crash and a cry of pain, moans and groans.
- 70% of the participants who were alone helped
- 40% of the participants who were in pairs (strangers) took action
- Pairs of friends helped 70% of the time
“He’s having a fit”→ Students were to communicate with each other only via microphones while in separate cubicles. They believed the group
consisted of two people, four people or six people. The “victim” told the others that he was epileptic and later he was heard choking and gasping,
apparently having a seizure and then became quiet.
The more “bystanders” the individual thought were present, the less likely they were to help
- 85% when alone
- 62% when they thought there were two others present
- 31% when they thought there were four others present
Processes contributing to bystander apathy
- Diffusion of responsibility→ tendency of an individual to assume that others will take responsibility (as a result, no one does), this is
cause of the bystander effect
- Audience inhibition→ fear of social blunders→ 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
- Social influence→ other onlookers provide a model for action
The three-in-one experiment
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