Pro- and antisocial behavior
Lecture 1: Definitions and main theories of prosocial behaviour
Why examine prosocial behavior?
Important theme in religion, philosophy, folktales,…
o Universal
o Adaptive function (evolutionary psychology)
1900: scientists (Mc Dougall) show interest in prosocial behavior, but interest readily
declines. He said it’s an instinct and therefore some people are more pro-social than others.
But it was also considered as racism, because he said some people are inferior. In the same
time, behavioural psychology was very popular (manipulating within experiments).
Turning point in the ‘60s: Murder of Kitty Genovese
In the early hours of March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed outside the apartment
building across the street from where she lived in an apartment above a row of shops on Austin
Street in Kew Gardens, Queens, a borough of New York City. Two weeks after the murder, The New
York Times published an article claiming that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack, but none of them
called the police or came to her aid.
The incident prompted inquiries into what became known as the bystander effect or "Genovese
syndrome", and the murder became a staple of American psychology textbooks for the next four
decades. However, researchers have since uncovered major inaccuracies in the New York Times
article.
What is prosocial behavior?
Prosocial behavior: Behavior that is defined by society as generally beneficial to other people and/or
to the ongoing political or cultural system
NOTE:
Always interpersonal There’s always a person helping one (or more) other people
Context dependent In a certain society something is pro-social, context is also the time
Specific forms of prosocial behavior are:
1. Helping
2. Altruism
3. Cooperation
1. Helping
= Any action that has the consequence of providing some benefit to or improving the well-being of
another person.
Four sorts of helping:
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
McGuire described four different types of helping behavior. Casual helping involves doing small
favors for casual acquaintances, such as letting someone borrow your cell phone for a quick call. If
you have ever helped a friend or family member to move, you’ve engaged in substantial personal
helping. This helping involves putting out a lot of effort to help someone over an extended time, so
that the recipient can have a benefit. Emotional helping means providing care and personalized
,emotional support to another, like listening to a friend who has had a bad day or giving knowledge
and advice to someone who requests it. Finally, emergency helping is assisting someone who has an
acute problem. This would be like calling 911 when you witness a car accident. A concept related to
McGuire’s classifications of helping behavior is social support, which can involve providing both
resources to help a person solve a problem and the emotional or psychological support required to
endure the stresses of life’s problems.
3 dimensional classification system (Pearce & Amato, 1980):
Seriousness: less severe/more severe
Formal (planned) vs informal: helping in car accident is spontaneous
Indirect/direct: indirect is e.g. calling the police, direct is dragging someone out of the car.
P.L. Pearce and P. R. Amato classified the kinds of helping as falling along three dimensions: level of
planning and formality, directness of the help, and seriousness of the need. Level of planning and
formality can range from very formal and planned, like working as a hospital volunteer each week, to
very spontaneous and informal, like helping someone who has dropped some papers in the hallway.
Directness of help refers to level of contact with the recipient of help from very direct, like helping a
young girl tie her shoes, to very indirect, like mailing off a charity donation to help hurricane victims.
Finally, the seriousness of the need should be taken into account. There is a big difference in lending
someone a few pennies when he or she is short at the grocery store and doing CPR and rescue
breathing on someone who has had a heart attack. The consequences of the former are very small,
whereas the consequences of the latter could mean the difference between life and death.
2. Altruism
= Helping purely out of the desire to benefit someone else, with no benefit (and often a cost) to
oneself
Helping can be either altruistic or for egoistic reasons.
3. Cooperation
= Acting together (in a coordinated way) in the pursuit of shared goals, the enjoyment of the joint
activity, or simply furthering the relationship. E.g. serious request, ice bucket challenge.
,When are people prosocial?
Latané and Darley Model:
Whether a person will act prosocially (or not) is the result of a logical decision-making process that
includes 5 steps.
1. Notice the event The clarity and context of the event as well as the mood of the helper
determines whether someone notices something is wrong.
o Noticing is less likely when walking through the busy city.
o Noticing is less likely when you are sad, because someone is more introvert.
2. Interpret event as emergency Clear signs of distress increase the chance of bystanders
interpreting the situation as an emergency.
3. Taking personal
o Bystander effect: When you are the only person witnessing an emergency, you are
more likely to help than when there are more witnesses
o Inverse relationship: the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely anyone will
help
o Why?
Pluralistic ignorance: looking to one another to (re)interpret situation (Step
2. Interpret the event)
Diffusion of responsibility: believing that someone else will take
responsibility
4. Know what to do Limited research
5. Implement decision Limited research
Shotland & Heinold (1985) Are people with a first aid training better able to decide what to do?
And do they take action?
They do not help more often
They do provide better quality of help
Why are people prosocial?
5 potential explanations:
We help people because
1. The benefits outweigh the costs
2. It is the norm
3. We feel empathy and we want to reduce stress
4. We learned this from others (Lecture 3)
5. It is an inherited characteristic (Evolutionary psychology)
, 1. Cost-benefit analysis: The decision to help depends on the consideration of costs and benefits:
people want to minimalize their costs and maximize their benefits.
2. It is the norm: Social norms are rules for acceptable and non-acceptable behavior in certain
situations
Reciprocity norm: we feel inclined to help others who have helped us
Social responsibility norm: we feel inclined to help others who are dependent on us
Schwartz theory of norm activation: Schwartz (1977) originally developed the NAM in the context of
altruistic behaviour. Personal norms form the core of this model. Schwartz (1977) states that these
norms are actively experienced “as feelings of moral obligation not as intentions” (p. 227). These
personal norms are used in the NAM to predict individual behaviour. The model states that these
personal norms are determined by two factors: the awareness that performing (or not performing)
the particular behaviour has certain consequences, and the feeling of responsibility for performing
the specific behaviour.
Personal norms are one’s individual feelings of moral obligation on how to behave in a certain
situation
Are better to predict than social norms.
Can be build up from societal norms, but also from other things (religion etc.)
Explanations presented mostly focused on cognitions
Think + weight + decide = help
Do people only help from cognition, or is there more to it?
3. We feel empathy and want to reduce stress.
Aversive arousal reduction We want to reduce our arousal when witnessing an event or
emergency either by helping or by walking away = Altruism vs Egoism
Negative state relief model Motivating stems from egocentric reasons: helping to make
yourself feel better.
o Negative emotions evoked?
o Can we reduce them by doing something? Yes = helping
o Is helping a way to reduce the negative emotions?
Empathy-altruism model Motivation stems from altruistic reasons: helping to make the
other feel better
o Negative emotions evoked? Yes = help
o Do we feel empathy for the person in need? No = help out of self interest
