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Prosocial Behaviour - Coggle Diagram

- - - - influence of social cognitive theory in an experiment manipulating peer influence to see the effects on prosocial behaviour
      - peers appeared to shape helping behaviour.
      - Situation were children in hospital unable to pay their bills. Park and Shin (2017) hypothesised that direct peer modelling would have a greater influence on prosocial behaviour than indirect modelling.
      - Participants came to lab for 20 min session. 3 confederates seated in seats. Participant read paragraph that depending on condition was either neutral or had a prosocial message. The prosocial message acted as a form of "peer pressure".
      - Participants were then told that study was over. Then were asked if they would like to take part in charity donation drive.
      - It was noticed that participants in prosocial situation donated, while the neutral condition did not.
      - Strengths: Genuine situation was used for measuring the dependent variable which adds onto the ecological validity of the study. Strong control over variables owing to lab experiment
      - Weaknesses: ethical consideration - deception (participants told study was over even though the donation part was a part of the study). Ethical concern- stress and harm (donation for sick people). Study was conducted with western sample thus cross-cultural generalizability is questionable.
      - Park and Shin's (2017) findings challenge theories of altruism suggesting that it results from stable and consistent characteristics such as personality or empathy
  - - - This may be extended to prosocial behavior. (In-group membership may have some influence on whether individuals behave for the benefit of others)
    - - effect of SIT and group size on Bystanderism
      - Researchers conducted a series of experiments in relation to bystander intervention and social groups + size
      - Bystander intervention was found to increase when bystanders and victims were from the same group.
      - Social identity and in-group bias has an impact on bystanderism
        
        Prosocial Behaviour: helping others; individuals behaving in such a manner so as to benefit other
      - Weaknesses
        
        Generalisability to other cultural contexts
        
        Ecological validity: Video footage is different from witnessing a violent confrontation in real life.
- - - - Altruism happens because individuals want to relive stress and negative feelings that arise when someone else needs help
      - Model proposed by Cialdini et al. (1973)
      - Exposure to any kind of distressing situation --> negative effect induced (embarrassment, guilt, sadness) --> elicit mood-elevating behaviour to reduce own negative effect and make helper feel better
      - Study #1: Regan et al. (1972)
        
        Aim: To investigate if people experiencing guilt would be more likely to help in order to relieve their negative mood state
        
        Participants: 40 females, opportunity sample: shopping mall
        
        Procedure for experiment #1: Participants approached by male confederate to take pictures for him. 2 conditions: guilt and no-guilt condition. Guilt condition: participants made to feel that they broke his camera. Non-guilt: camera not working; participant not responsible. Participants then approached by female confederate who drops sweets. Observed rate of helping behaviour across guilt and non-guilt conditions
        
        Findings: 55% of guilt condition members helped and 15% of non-guilt condition members helped.
        
        Conclusion: Experience of guilt was relieved by altruism
        
        Evaluation
        
        Strengths: field-experiment --> high ecological validity + high inter-observer reliability --> eliminates researcher bias + strengthens internal validity + standardised procedure --> high replicability and reliability can be established more easily
        
        Weaknesses: lack of controlled extraneous variables (field-experiment) --> weakens internal validity + small sample size of only females --> low generalisability + deception was used, so ethical concerns
  - - - Egoistic helping vs. altruistic helping
    - - Aim: To demonstrate that altruism is not necessarily egoistic and can be motivated by empathy
      - Participants: female uni students in the US
      - Procedure: Participants completed questionnaire to establish similarity Elaine and then grouped into and high-empathy and low-empathy conditions. All participants observed Elaine receive electric shocks and were asked if they would take her place. Some participants in each condition were also given the option for an easy escape, while others were given a difficult escape option.
      - Conclusion: findings consistent with the empathy-based altruism
      - Evaluation
        
        Strengths: high replicability so greater scope for establishing reliability + second experiment confirmed findings of this experiment --> high reliability + true-experiment --> causal relationship can be established
        
        Weaknesses: only women --> low generalisability + mental harm/stress (watching Elaine) + watched Elaine on TV, so artificial --> low ecological validity
      - Findings: low-empathy condition showed lowest helping rates + high-empathy condition members did not escape even when the option was easy