Ch 11 Social notes PDF

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Prosocial Behavior ! • Prosocial Behavior: Any act performed with the goal of benefiting another person. • Altruism: The desire to help another person even if it involves a cost to the helper. • Someone might act in a prosocial way out of self-interest, hoping to get something in return. Altruism is helping purely out of the desire to benefit someone else, with no benefit (and often a cost) to oneself. ! Evolutionary Psychology Instinct and Genes • Evolutionary psychology: the attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection • Kin Selection: The idea that behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection. • people reported that they would be more likely to help genetic relatives than nonrelatives in lifeand-death situations, such as a house fire. • Norm of Reciprocity: The expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future. • Some researchers suggest that the emotion of gratitude—the positive feelings that are caused by the perception that one has been helped by others—evolved in order to regulate reciprocity. • Evolutionary psychologists believe that people help others because of factors that have become ingrained in our genes. ! Social Exchange: The Costs and Rewards of Helping • Social Exchange theory: much of what we do stems from the desire to maximize our rewards and minimize our costs. • Social exchange theory doesn’t trace this desire back to our evolutionary roots, nor does it assume that the desire is genetically based. Social exchange theorists assume that people in their relationships with others try to maximize the ratio of social rewards to social costs. • Helping decreases when the costs are high, such as when it would put us in physical danger, result in pain or embarrassment, or simply take too much time. ! Empathy and Altruism: the Pure Motive for Helping • Empathy: The ability to put oneself in the shoes of another person and to experience events and emotions (e.g., joy and sadness) the way that person experiences them. • Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: The idea that when we feel empathy for a person, we will attempt to help that person for purely altruistic reasons, regardless of what we have to gain. ! Personal Qualities and Prosocial Behavior ! Individual Differences: the Altruistic Personality • Altruistic Personality: The qualities that cause an individual to help others in a wide variety of situations. ! Gender Differences: • Norms prescribe different traits and behaviors for males and females, learned as boys and girls are growing up. • In Western cultures, the male sex role includes being chivalrous and heroic; females are expected to be nurturing and caring and to value close, long-term relationships.

• More girls than boys reported doing volunteer work in their communities. ! Cultural Differences: • On the one hand, there is ample evidence that people often favor their in-groups, or the groups with which they identify as a member, and discriminate against members of out-groups. • In-Group: The group with which an individual identifies as a member. • Out-Group: Any group with which an individual does not identify. • We tend to help out-group members for a different reason—we do so, to put it bluntly, when there is something in it for us, such as making us feel good about ourselves or making a good impression on others. • Simpatía refers to a range of social and emotional traits, including being friendly, polite, goodnatured, pleasant, and helpful toward others. • If a culture strongly values friendliness and prosocial behavior, people may be more likely to help strangers on city streets. ! Religion and Prosocial Behavior: • Religious people are more likely to help than other people are if the person in need of help shares their beliefs. • When it comes to helping strangers, however, such as donating blood, or tipping a waiter or waitress, religious people are no more helpful than nonreligious people. ! The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior: Positive Mood • Being in a good mood can increase helping for three reasons: 1. Good moods make us look on the bright side of life. 2. Helping other people is an excellent way of prolonging our good mood. 3. Good moods increase the amount of attention we pay to ourselves, and this factor in turn makes us more likely to behave according to our values and ideals. Bad Mood • Sadness can also lead to an increase in helping, because when people are sad, they are motivated to engage in activities that make them feel better. • People often act on the idea that good deeds cancel out bad deeds. When they have done something that has made them feel guilty, helping another person balances things out, reducing their guilty feelings. ! Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior Environmental • Urban Overload Hypothesis: The theory that people living in cities are constantly bombarded with stimulation and that they keep to themselves to avoid being overwhelmed by it. • People are more likely to help if in a small town than a large city. Residential Mobility • As it turns out, people who have lived for a long time in one place are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors that help their community. Residing in one place leads to a greater attachment to the community, more ◦ interdependence with one’s neighbors, and a greater concern with one’s reputation in the community. Number of Bystanders • Bystander Effect: The finding that the greater the number of bystanders who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help.

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Also need to notice an event in order to act. Might be in a rush/hurry ◦ • Interpret it as an emergency in order to act Is help needed? ◦ Pluralistic Ignorance: The case in which people think that everyone else is interpreting a ◦ situation in a certain way, when in fact they are not. • Assuming responsibility Diffusion of Responsibility: The phenomenon wherein each bystander’s sense of ◦ responsibility to help decreases as the number of witnesses increases. • Knowing how to help Need to know what help is needed ◦ • Decide to implement help Need to actually help, not just think about it ◦ Effects of Media • Playing prosocial video game or song lyrics makes people more cooperative By increasing people’s empathy toward someone in need of help and increasing the ◦ accessibility of thoughts about helping others. ! How Can Helping Be Increased Increasing the likelihood that bystanders will intervene • There is evidence that simply being aware of the barriers to helping in an emergency can increase people’s chances of overcoming those barriers. • Another approach is simply to remind ourselves that it can be important to overcome our inhibitions and do the right thing. Increasing Volunteerism • Encouraging people to volunteer while preserving the sense that they freely choose to do so has been shown to increase people’s sense of well-being and their intentions to volunteer again in the future. Positive Psychology: Human Virtues, Prosocial Behavior • The positive psychologist focuses on qualities of the person, and would seek to increase human virtues such as empathy and altruism. But, helping behavior often depends more on the nature of the social situation than the personalities of the people in that situation. •...