Helping and cooperation - summary of chapter 14 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)

Social psychology
Chapter 14
Helping and cooperation

Pro-social behavior: behavior intended to help someone else.
Cooperation: involves two or more people working together toward a common goal that will benefit all involved.
Altruism: behavior intended to help someone else without any prospect of personal rewards for the helper.
Egoism: behavior motivated by the desire to obtain personal rewards.

When do people help?

Helping is crucially dependent on people’s interpretation of a situation.

Is help needed and deserved?

Helping is dependent on people’s perception of someone as both needing and deserving help. The ability and motivation to pay attention to others’ needs influence whether people think help is needed. People are more likely to help those not held responsible for their own need.

Perceiving need

Several factors influence the judgment that someone needs help.
Becoming aware of a need is usually the first step in the helping chain of events.

• Anything that distracts potential helpers from their surroundings makes noticing need less likely.
• Being in a positive mood increases people’s sensitivity to others

Judging deservingness

Helping depends on whether we think help is deserved, and groups typically develop norms that dictate who does and who does not deserve help.

The norm of social responsibility: a norm that those able to take care of themselves have a duty and obligation to assist those who cannot.

Especially in the individualist cultures in the West, deservingness also depends on the attributions we make about controllability.

• If we think people are in need ‘through no fault of their own’ (uncontrollable), we are more motivated to help.
• We perceive people as having ‘brought it on themselves’ (controllable) we think they don’t deserve help and we are less likely to offer it.

Stereotypes of social groups often influence judgments about controllability and deservingness.

Should I help?

People sometimes help because social norms, their own standards, of the behavior of others show them that it is appropriate to do so. However, sometimes the presence of other potential helpers can diminish the pressures to help. While some norms work against helping, others dictate that certain people should receive help.

Even when people think that helping is both needed and deserved, action doesn’t always follow.

Is helping up to me? Diffusion of responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility: the effect of other people present on diminishing each individual’s perceived responsibility for helping, one explanation for the bystander effect.

Bystander effect: the finding that the presence of more bystanders consistently decreases the likelihood of any one person giving help.
Not only the physical presence, but even the thought of the presence of other can have this effect.

There are circumstances in which people help regardless of how many others are present.
For example, when the situation is perceived as dangerous.

When norms make helping inappropriate

Other people’s reactions can influence whether any one individual decides to help.
People sometimes fail to act because they fear appearing foolish in form of others. So we usually keep calm and check to see what the others present are doing.
When people notice that bystanders and passerby are unresponsive, that observation reduces the likelihood that they will help.

Other norms can make entire categories of people unlikely to receive help.
Like norm for private family.

When norms make helping appropriate

Norms do not always inhibit helping.

• Norm of social responsibility
• If one person rushes to help, many more may also do so.

Why do people help? Helping and cooperation for mastery and connectedness

Biological perspectives: is pro-social behavior in our genes?

Evolutionary principles suggest that some forms of helping have been naturally selected because they increase survival of specific genes. In humans, cognitive and social processes mediate such biological based helping.

There are several ways in which helping others could benefit the survival of the helper’s genes:

• Helping kin may be like helping oneself
  When individuals help relatives who share their genes, the genes have a better chance of survival, even if each individual carrier of them does not.
• Help is given to another may be reciprocated at a later time
• Entire groups may prosper and flourish when they include cooperative members, perhaps at the expense of groups that include more selfish members.
• Helping or cooperation may ultimately produce more indirect rewards, as others learn of the pro-social behavior and spread the word, creating a positive reputation for the helper within the group.

Evolution can favor pro-social tendencies, even when they are costly or dangerous to the helper.
In humans, helping and other types of behavior are not genetically ‘hard-wired’ and inflexible, but are the result of flexible cognitive and emotional processes that guide our behavior in diverse and changing environments.
Pro-social behavior in humans is likely to be the result of a naturally selected predisposition, or motivation, that can be activated and influenced by social or cognitive processes.

Helping for mastery: the personal rewards and costs of helping

Help may be motivated by perceived rewards or deterred by perceived costs or risks. These rewards and risks can be emotional: people sometimes help to alleviate their own distress at the victim’s suffering.

Rewards and costs of helping

The desire to help often depends on perceptions of the consequences of helping, on its potential rewards and costs.

The costs of helping can be varied. Even when the need is clear and the victim seems deserving, people may not help if the costs appear to high.

Specific circumstances can lower the costs of helping.

• The more helping skills a person has, the lower the costs of helping.
• Those who are generally high in self-efficacy are also helpful.

Emotional rewards of helping

Although helping sometimes leads to concrete rewards, more often helping is its own reward.

• We feel good about ourselves because we helped others.
  Such internal rewards can be an even more powerful motivator of helping than external forces.
• Because helping makes us feel good, people sometimes help to keep their spirits high.
• People can also help to escape from a bad mood. Guilty people are more helpful.

Is helping pure egoism?

Negative-state relief model of helping: the theory that most people hate to watch others suffer, so the ultimate goal of their help is not to aid the person in need for his or her sake, but to reduce the helper’s own distress.

Other findings suggests that the negative state model is an incomplete explanation for helping.
Sad people are not helpful. Depression and profound grief disengage their suffers from the social world and replace social concern with self-absorption.

Helping for connectedness: empathy and altruism

People are often motivated by a feeling of empathy to relieve another’s suffering, regardless of personal rewards and costs.

Empathy-altruism model: the theory that feelings of emphatic concern lead to a motive to help someone in need for his or her own sake.
People can experience two types of emotion when they see someone in trouble.

• Personal distress
• Emphatic concern

Personal distress motivates either egoistic helping or escape.

Many subtle factors may create a social connection that in turn facilitates helping.

When empathy motivates helping, it can have a strange effect. By focusing on a specific individual, it may lead us to ignore the number of people needing help.

Mastery and connectedness in cooperation

In a social dilemma, rewards for each individual are in direct conflict with what is best for the group. However, people can be motivated by changes in rewards or costs, by trust for other group members, and by feelings of group connectedness, to act for the good of the group. When group identification increases commitment to shared goals and norms, social dilemmas can be successfully resolved.

Cooperation involves benefiting an entire group of people.

Social dilemmas: self-interest versus group interest

Social dilemmas: a form of interdependence in which the most rewarding action for each individual will, if chosen by all individuals, produce a negative outcome for the entire group.
Often the temptation of non-cooperation is even greater because individual rewards are usually immediate, while the group benefits may be evident only in the long-term.

Mastery motives in social dilemmas: rewards and costs

One obvious way to change behavior is to change the rewards and costs that group members face.
In large-scale dilemmas, rewards and fines are most often implemented by centralized authorities.

Rewards and punishments can be more effective if they are internally imposed, by the group itself.

The benefits of self-organization for cooperation help explain why group size is so crucial for cooperation.

• Free riding is easier in large groups
• Larger groups will on average have more resources, some of which they can devote to monitoring and punishing free riders.

Intermediate group sizes are the best.

The role of trust

The development of norms that support cooperation and mutual trust that others will follow them is essential.
Trust: the expectation that others will act pro-socially during a social interaction.
Trust is a central factor in determining one’s own behavior in dilemmas.

• Trust increases cooperation
• The more strongly people’s interest are in conflict, the more important trust becomes.

Increasing trust when cooperation is necessary:

• Increase communication among group members
• Ensuring equal opportunities and outcomes among group members

Connectedness motives in social dilemmas: social identification

Identification with the group can increase trust.
When group belonging becomes uppermost in people’s minds, cooperation can be motivated by social identification, promoting the desire to benefit the group as a whole regardless of outcomes for the self.

When individuals identify with groups, three changes usually take place:

• The greater good of the group becomes top priority
• When the group thinks and works together as one, people are likely to trust that other group members will also be helping, rather than hurting, the group effort.
• Group norms favoring cooperation become salient guides for individual action

Shared group identity increases cooperative behavior in social dilemmas.
Group identification can even overcome some of the negative consequences of group size.
Group identification can dictate helping all members of any size group.

Individual differences in cooperation

Social value orientation: stable differences in the ways people act in social dilemmas.

Role of superficial or systematic processing in helping and cooperation

The impact of processing

When desires and norms conflict, various factors may be considered superficially or thought through extensively before a decision about helping is made. Emotions can play a role in this process, for strong emotion disrupts extensive processing. When helping is a considered decision, it can result in a long-term commitment. In general, however, quicker decisions tend to be more pro-social than considered ones.

Superficial processing, spontaneous helping.

Strong emotions can motivate us to action, including helpful action.
Strong emotions also limit our ability to think things through carefully.
The combinations of arousal, emotions, and split-second timing usually leads people to respond to emergencies quickly and impulsively.
When arousal is high and time for reflection is limited, people act on the basis of the most accessible motives or norms.

When people process superficially, the most readily accessible mental representation will be the most likely to influence behavior.

Systematic processing, planned helping

In some circumstances, a would-be helper may give careful, even agonized, consideration to the available information.
Extensive though can even reverse a first, quick reaction.

One of the most typical forms of planned helping is volunteering.
Volunteering can be motivated by a number of different goals

• Mastery needs
• Connectedness needs
• Self-esteem needs

Group identification also motivates helping when volunteers help out of a sense of social responsibility, or in order to create a better society in general or to improve the condition of their group.

More helping form impulsive or form deliberation?

Superficial processing resting on people’s quick intuitions leads to more pro-social behavior.

Pro-social behavior in society

Help that helps, help that hurts

Receiving help can have negative as well as positive consequences, especially if recipients cannot reciprocate because of an unequal power relationship between helper can helped, or because receiving help makes hem look and feel less competent.

Helpers usually feel good about themselves.
How it feels to receive help depends on the recipient’s need and how being helped affects self-esteem.

Help that relives physical suffering or mental anguish is always welcome.
Help that creates a positive relationship between helper and helped is welcome too.
Cooperation builds trust and respect and helpers feel protective and proud of the person they benefited. Those of the receiving end of help and cooperation typically feel gratitude.

But, receiving help is not always positive.

• It implies that the helper is more powerful, more able, or more in control

Help may trigger feelings of gratitude only when the individual who received help feels at least partially in control, responsible for his or her own successful outcomes.

Dependency-oriented help: provides a solution to the immediate problem, without teaching how to solve future problems.
Autonomy-oriented help: provides tools or knowledge to solve problems on one’s own.

Increasing pro-social behavior in society

Helping in society can be increased by:

• Reduce ambiguity: make the need for help and cooperation clear
• Increase internal attributions for helping and cooperation
• Teach norms that support helping and cooperation
• Activate pro-social norms
• Infuse, don’t diffuse responsibility
• Promote identification with those who need help and cooperation