Helping

1
Chapter 12

• Helping

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Defining Prosocial Behavior
Prosocial Behavior
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
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Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Any action intended to benefit another
(regardless of motive)
Giving a large tip to a waiter to impress your
boss with your generosity
Prosocial Behavior
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
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Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Prosocial Behavior
Benefits another intentionally for no external
reward
Sending 20 to a charity to make yourself feel
good
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
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Type of Behavior
Definition
Example
Prosocial Behavior
Benefits another intentionally for no external or
internal reward
Running into a burning building to rescue a
complete stranger
Benevolence
Pure Altruism
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Dilemma

• Two people are drowning and you are only able to
  rescue one of them (and the other will die)
• The first is a close friend with whom you have
  always had a very good relationship
• The second is a close relative (e.g., brother or
  sister) with whom you have always had a
  difficult, conflict-filled relationship
• Which would you save?
• Why?

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Improving Our Own Basic Welfare Gaining Genetic
and Material Benefits

• In the past, evolutionary theory had difficulty
  understanding helping behavior
• Helping someone else often detracts from your own
  fitness
• but 70 of US households make charitable
  contributions and nearly 10 million Americans
  donate blood each year
• Two additional insights help make evolutionary
  sense of helping behavior
• Inclusive fitness
• Reciprocal aid

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Inclusive Fitness

• Inclusive fitness helps distinguish between
  personal survival and genetic survival
• Inclusive Fitness The ability of ones genes to
  survive in ones own offspring AND in the
  offspring of ones relatives
• Organisms share more genes with siblings than
  they share with nephewsor distant cousins
• Helping a close relative promotes the survival of
  those genes

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Inclusive Fitness

• As a consequence of inclusive fitness, we should
  be willing to accept personal risk and loss if it
  increases the chance that our genes will survive
• Research has shown that many organisms aid their
  relatives (e.g., feeding, defending, and
  sheltering) in direct relation to their degree of
  relatedness
• What about humans?

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Inclusive Fitness
Burnstein, Crandall, Kitayama, 1994

• Three people need you to pick up something from
  the store for them
• Your child
• Your grandfather
• An acquaintance
• You have time to only perform one errand
• Which do you do?

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Burnstein, Crandall, Kitayama (1994)
3.0
For everyday help, people tended to help close
relatives more than non-relatives
2.5
Tendency to Help
2.0
1.5
1.0
High(parents, siblings, children)
Mod. (grand-parents)
Low (cousins)
None (acquaintances)
Degree of Relatedness
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Inclusive Fitness
Burnstein, Crandall, Kitayama, 1994

• Is the tendency to help relatives even stronger
  when the help is directly related to survival?
• There are three people asleep in different rooms
  of a burning house
• Your child
• Your grandfather
• An acquaintance
• You have time to only rescue oneand the others
  WILL die
• Which do you save?

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Burnstein, Crandall, Kitayama (1994)
3.0
The difference became even more pronounced in
life-or-death situations
2.5
Tendency to Help
2.0
1.5
1.0
High(parents, siblings, children)
Mod. (grand-parents)
Low (cousins)
None (acquaintances)
Degree of Relatedness
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Similarity and Familiarity

• Similarity may be a cue to genetic relatedness
  (our relatives look like us)
• In 34 studies, 29 found significantly higher
  helping for similar over dissimilar others
  (Dovidio, 1984)
• However, people will often help people of other
  races, if not helping might make them appear
  prejudiced (Gaertner Dovidio, 1984)

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Similarity and Familiarity

• Familiarity may also be a cue to genetic
  relatedness (our ancestors encountered their
  relatives on a daily basis)
• If familiarity is associated with shared genes,
  helping familiar others would have generally
  helped relatives (Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio,
  Piliavin, 1995)
• In many species, familiarity increases the
  probability of helping

16
Reciprocal Aid

• Reciprocal Aid Help that occurs in return for
  prior help (or with the expectation of future
  help)
• Other animals will help non-relatives if they
  live in close proximity and can better survive by
  sharing

17
Learning to Help

• Instilled beliefs are also important
• Ex. Students who have studied economics (and
  learned the principle of self-interest)
• Are less likely to contribute to charities
  (Frank, Gilovich, Regan, 1993)
• Are more likely to exploit a partner in a
  bargaining game (Maxwell Ames, 1981)
• Are more likely to negotiate for a lopsided
  payment (Kahneman et al., 1986)

18
Learning to Help

• The expanded sense of We
• Children exposed to others of different ethnic
  and religious backgrounds later develop a feeling
  of we-ness with the larger human family
  (Piliavin et al., 1981)
• European Gentiles who helped Jews escape from
  Nazis were exposed to more individuals from
  different ethnic backgrounds growing up than were
  non-helpers (Oliner Oliner, 1988)

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Questions

• If we are less likely to help those with whom we
  have less connection, then how would we respond
  if a stranger was in trouble?
• Forgot a scantron on exam day?
• Needed a ride home after class?
• Had a flat tire on the side of the road?
• Was being hurt by someone else?

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New York Times, March 27, 1964 For more than
half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens
in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman
in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. Twice
their chatter and the sudden glow of their
bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him
off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and
stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the
police during the assault one witness called
after the woman was dead. That was two weeks ago
today. Still shocked is Assistant Chief Inspector
Frederick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough's
detectives and a veteran of 25 years of homicide
investigations. He can give a matter-of-fact
recitation on many murders. But the Kew Gardens
slaying baffles him--not because it is a murder,
but because the "good people" failed to call the
police. "As we have reconstructed the crime," he
said, "the assailant had three chances to kill
this woman during a 35-minute period. He returned
twice to complete the job. If we had been called
when he first attacked, the woman might not be
dead now."
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Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was
called Kitty by almost everyone in the
neighborhood, was returning home from her job as
manager of a bar in Hollis. She parked her red
Fiat in a lot adjacent to her apartment
building. She turned off the lights of her car,
locked the door, and started to walk the 100 feet
to the entrance of her apartment. The entrance to
the apartment is in the rear of the building
because the front is rented to retail stores. At
night the quiet neighborhood is shrouded in the
slumbering darkness that marks most residential
areas. Miss Genovese noticed a man at the far end
of the lot, near a seven-story apartment house
near her building. She halted. Then, nervously,
changed direction toward a nearby police
call-box. She got as far as a street light in
front of a bookstore before the man grabbed her.
She screamed. Lights went on in the nearby
10-story apartment building which faces the
bookstore. Windows slid open and voices
punctuated the early-morning stillness. Miss
Genovese screamed "Oh, my God, he stabbed me!
Please help me! Please help me!" From one of the
upper windows in the apartment house, a man
called down "Let that girl alone!" The assailant
looked up at him, shrugged, and walked down the
street toward a white sedan parked a short
distance away. Miss Genovese struggled to her
feet. Lights went out. The killer returned to
Miss Genovese, now trying to make her way around
the side of the building by the parking lot to
get to her apartment. The assailant stabbed her
again. "I'm dying!" she shrieked. "I'm
dying!" Windows were opened again, and lights
went on in many apartments. The assailant got
into his car and drove away. Miss Genovese
staggered to her feet. A city bus heading for
Kennedy International Airport passed. It was 335
A.M. The assailant returned. By then, Miss
Genovese had crawled to the back of the building,
where the freshly painted brown doors to the
apartment house held out hope for safety. The
killer tried the first door she wasn't there. At
the second door, he saw her slumped on the floor
at the foot of the stairs. He stabbed her a third
timefatally (and he may have attempted to
sexually assault herit was later discovered that
the attacker was a necrophiliac). It was 350 by
the time the police received their first call,
from a man who was a neighbor of Miss Genovese.
In two minutes they were at the scene. The
neighbor, a 70-year-old woman, and another woman
were the only persons on the street. Nobody else
came forward. The man explained that he had
called the police after much deliberation. He had
phoned a friend in Nassau County for advice and
then he had crossed the roof of the building to
the apartment of the elderly woman to get her to
make the call. "I didn't want to get involved,"
he sheepishly told police. Six days later, the
police arrested Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old
business machine operator, and charged him with
homicide. Moseley had no previous record. He was
married with two children. When questioned by the
police, Moseley also confessed to two other
sexual assaults murders. The police stressed
how simple it would have been to have gotten in
touch with them. "A phone call," said one of the
detectives, "would have done it." Today
witnesses from the neighborhood find it difficult
to explain why they didn't call the police. A
housewife, knowingly if quite casually, said, "We
thought it was a lovers' quarrel." A husband and
wife both said, "Frankly, we were afraid." They
seemed aware of the fact that events might have
been different. A distraught woman, wiping her
hands in her apron, said, "I didn't want my
husband to get involved." One couple, now willing
to talk about that night, said they heard the
first screams. The husband looked thoughtfully at
the bookstore where the killer first grabbed Miss
Genovese. "We went to the window to see what was
happening," he said, "but the light from our
bedroom made it difficult to see the street." The
wife, still apprehensive, added "I put out the
light and we were able to see better. Asked why
they hadn't called the police, she shrugged and
replied "I don't know." A man peeked out from a
slight opening in the doorway to his apartment
and rattled off an account of the killer's second
attack. Why hadn't he called the police at the
time? "I was tired," he said without emotion. "I
went back to bed." It was 425 A.M. when the
ambulance arrived to take the body of Miss
Genovese. It drove off. "Then," a solemn police
detective said, "the people came out.  In 1968,
during a trip to a Buffalo, New York hospital for
surgery, he overpowered a guard and took five
hostages, sexually assaulting one of them, before
he was recaptured. He was alive and remained in
prison after being denied parole a 12th time on
February 3rd, 2006. His latest parole hearing
included his defense that "For a victim outside,
it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair,
but for the person who's caught, it's forever."

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Bystanders as Sources of Help

• Why didnt any of the 38 witnesses to Kitty
  Genoveses murder help?
• Latane Darley (1970) suggested that the
  witnesses did not help BECAUSE there were so many
  witnesses!!
• Bystander effect The tendency of a bystander to
  be LESS likely to help in an emergency if there
  are other onlookers present

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Bystanders as Sources of Help

• Diffusion of responsibility Tendency for each
  group member to dilute personal responsibility
  for acting by spreading it among all other group
  members
• Example Bystanders to an emergency may assume
  someone else will call the police

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Bystander Effect

• Darley Latane (1968) exposed college students
  (via an intercom system) to an individual having
  a seizure
• 85 tried to help if they believed they were the
  only person to hear it
• 62 tried to help if one other person heard it
• 31 helped if four other individuals heard it

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Bystander Effect and Diffusion of Responsibility

• The social responsibility norm obliges us to help
  those who are dependent on us for help
• The presence of others diffuses the helping
  responsibility to those othersand the victim
  becomes less dependent on us for aid (which
  weakens our obligation to help)

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Pluralistic Ignorance

• Describe this situation
• How likely would you be to offer aid to this
  individual?
• Would you be LESS likely to offer help if the
  person walking in front of you simply walked by
  this person?

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Bystanders as Sources of Information About Helping

• Pluralistic Ignorance Phenomenon that occurs
  when bystanders to an emergency, trying to look
  poised, give misleading cues to others that help
  is unnecessary

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Bystanders as Sources of Information About Helping

• In one study, researchers pumped smoke into a lab
  while students filled out a questionnaire
• Some students were left alone
• Some with 2 other real participants
• Some with 2 other confederates who pretended
  nothing was wrong

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Latane Darley (1968)
80
60
Percentage Reporting Smoke
40
20
0
Alone
With 2 other real subjects
With 2 calm confederates
33
Latane Darley (1968)
80
60
Percentage Reporting Smoke
40
20
0
Alone
With 2 other real subjects
With 2 calm confederates
34
Latane Darley (1968)
80
60
Percentage Reporting Smoke
40
20
0
Alone
With 2 other real subjects
With 2 calm confederates
35
Bystanders as Sources of Information About Helping

• Results suggest that people look to others to
  provide information
• Those who did not respond to the smoke would
  often define the smoke in non-emergency terms
  (e.g., steam, smog, or air conditioning vapor)
• If no one else seems upset, that suggests this is
  not an emergency

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Bystanders as Sources of Information About Helping

• Sometimes people assume help would be seen as an
  unwelcome intrusion
• When a woman fighting with a man shouted I
  dont even know you! - help was more likely than
  if she shouted I dont know why I married
  you! (Shotland Straw, 1976)

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The single most important factor in whether
people help others is the presence of
bystanders!! People in trouble are more likely to
receive help if one person is present than if a
large crowd is there.
Interpret as emergency
YES
Notice the incident
NO
No help
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The single most important factor in whether
people help others is the presence of
bystanders!! People in trouble are more likely to
receive help if one person is present than if a
large crowd is there.
Assume responsibility
YES
Interpret as emergency
YES
NO
Notice the incident
No help
NO
No help
39
The single most important factor in whether
people help others is the presence of
bystanders!! People in trouble are more likely to
receive help if one person is present than if a
large crowd is there.
Try to help
YES
Assume responsibility
YES
Interpret as emergency
NO
No help
YES
NO
Notice the incident
No help
NO
No help
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Gender and Help

• Women are universally perceived as kinder, more
  soft-hearted, and more helpful (Williams Best,
  1990)
• But over 90 of Carnegie Hero awards go to men
  for saving, or attempting to save, the life of
  another.
• Ex. Arland Williams, Jr. was 1 of 6 survivors of
  a 1982 plane crash into the Potomac River (73
  occupants died on impact). He was the most alert
  of the survivors and helped helicopter pilots
  rescue the others before eventually drowning.
• Why?
• Women are more likely to help those they already
  know
• Men are more likely to help strangers in
  emergency situations

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Religious and Ethical Codes

• April 29, 1992 An LA jury acquitted 4 White
  police officers who were videotaped beating
  Rodney King
• The result was a 72-hour riot
• Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck and
  severely beaten with a claw hammer and debris
  (his skull was fractured in 91 places)

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Religious and Ethical Codes

• Three Black strangers who saw the ordeal on the
  news rushed to his aid
• Titus Murphy helped because he was large enough
  to physically protect Denny
• Bobby Green helped because he was also a truck
  driver and could drive the vehicle
• Why did Lei Yuille (a petite, 38-year-old
  dietitian) drive more than 10 minutes (through a
  riot) to reach Denny?
• The reason that she gave for helping a White
  stranger during the riot was simply that she was
  a Christian

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Religious and Ethical Codes

• People who define themselves as highly committed
  to their spiritual beliefs are, compared to the
  less committed, twice as likely to volunteer time
  to help the needy (Gallup, 1984)

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Parable of the Good Samaritan

• A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,
  and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped
  him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half
  dead. Now by chance a priest was going down the
  road and when he saw him, he passed by on the
  other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to
  the place and saw him, passed by on the other
  side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near
  him and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.
  He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having
  poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on
  his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took
  care of him. The next day he took out two
  denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said,
  Take care of him and when I come back, I will
  repay whatever more you spend

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Helping Behavior

• Darley Batson (1973) -- Good Samaritan study
• Theology students helped someone in need (a
  shabbily dressed person lying in the hallway),
  but only if they were not in a hurry
• The catch some students were hurrying to give a
  lecture on the good Samaritan, but this had no
  effect on their likelihood of helping!

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Good Samaritan Study
Hurry
No Hurry
Samaritan Lecture
HELP OFFERED
NO HELP
Non-helping Lecture
HELP OFFERED
NO HELP