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Altruism and morality are naturally inherent in humans - Coggle Diagram
Altruism and morality are naturally inherent in humans
altruism
definitions - important
"terms such as 'prosocial', 'helping' and 'altruism' are often used interchangeably" b1 p192
"'helping' has been defined by Bierhoff (2002) as a broad term, involving 'all forms of interpersonal support'" b1 p.191
"'prosocial behaviour'... is defined as intending 'to improve the situation of the help-recipient... not motivated by the fulfilment of professional obligations, and the recipient is a person, not an organisation'" (Bierhoff, 2002) b1 p.191
There are often veiled motivations for acts of 'helping' in this context, such as tax relief for businesses that meet a threshold of charitable donations
Macaulay and Berkowitz (1970) define altrusim as 'behaviour carried out to benefit another without anticipation of rewards from external sources" b1 p192
Piliavin et al. (1981) "prosocial behaviour is 'defined by society as behaviour generally beneficial to other people and the ongoing social system". b1 p192
"a lack of consistency in the use of terms points to a broader lack of integration of the wider field and presents potential problems for explaining help at general level" b1 p220
"altruism...can be defined as unselfish concern for the welfare of others" b3 p119
Social psychology
Evidence
against
innate altruism and morality
the Kitty Genovese murder case
"38 witnesses watched mosely stab kitty to death on the street outside their homes, doing nothing until she was dead" b1 p194
bystander intervention
"there is no evidence that 38 witnesses watched...without intervening" b1 p212
the murder itself took place in a stairwell where few people could see. p212 b1
Latane and Darley 1968 choking experiment
"rates of and speed of helping decreased with the number of other people believed to be part of the discussion" b1 p195
suggestive that other peoples behaviour (normative influence) affects helping behaviour more than our apparent inherent altruistic inclinations
Diffusion of responsibility
"when other people are present in a helping situation, the responsbility for taking action is shared between all of them" b1 p195co
this suggests that helping is motivated by a sense of obligation as opposed to a genuine concern for others wellbeing
Latane and Darley identified certain conditions for a bystander to intervene with help
interpret it as an emergency
this suggests there is a threshold of severity that must be met before we are willing to help someone, counter to our supposed inherently altruistic nature
Decide they are personally responsbile
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failure to do so in the presence of others can be explained by 'pluralistic ignorance' (Latane and Nida 1981) b1 p196
can altriusm in its truest sense be conditional?
"by about four years of age, children share (even at cost to themselves) with their friends more than with non-friends or strangers" b3 p125
Audience inhibtion
evidence
for
innate altruism and morality
consider in terms of amplification/enhancing innate tendencies?
Cialdini et al (1997) "reinterpreted Batsons results to suggest that altruism can be reinterpreted as egotism due to 'self-other overlap'" b1 p201
"Hustson et al carried out interviews with people who had intervened in dangerous criminal incidents. They did not find personality differences between this group of people and a group matched for age, sex, education and ethnic background" b1 p205
"they found that interveners were taller and heavier... and had a greater previous exposure to violence" b1 p204
this suggests that self preservation takes precedence over concern for others
the behaviour of people who were on the tube during the london bombings goes contradicts this
"rather than act in a selfish or self-serving manner in the aftermath of the bombs - and despite still being in danger - people went out of their way to help others in the emergency situation" b1 p214
"Fischer et al (2006) also show that the bystander effect does not hold in cases of dangerous or violent emergenies" b1 p212
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"is helpfulness a product of our experiences or part of our essential nature"?
Consider in terms of inhibitory processes?
is altruistic behaviour conditional upon identity?
Levine's football fan experiment
"when the participants were thinking of themselves as Manchester united fans, they only helped when the victim wore the manchester united shirt" b1 p215
"when participants thought about themselves as football fans [more broadly]... they were equally likely to help the victim when he wore the liverpool shirt or the manchester united shirt" b1 p215
some identitties may contain injunctions to 'look after our own'.
helping one individual or group is often at the expense of another individual or (out)group
altriusim is therfore inherently selective?
a social reflection of the biological /evolutionary favouring of those who are more closely related
power relations
helping can be motivated by a desire to communicate superiority to the helped
"motives may appear good, but the help offered is strategically intended to keep the less powerful in their place" b1 p217
"Nadler... identifies two... different kinds of helping: dependency - orientated help and autonomy - orientated help." b1 p217
"under some conditions, helping behaviour can be negatively experienced by its recipients" b1 p217
"Nadler shows how powerful groups can assume they know best about what kind of help might be needed, and deliver it without involving the recipient in the decision. He calls this 'assumptive help'
"helping behaviour is not always good and must be understood in terms of the power and status relations between the helper and the helped" b1 p218
Piliavin et al (1969)'s arousal: cost - reward model b1 p198
researchers staged a series of emergencies on the subway trains of new york
"did not find decreased rates of helping when more people were present - a finding they attributed to the setting of their experiements and the size of the groups involved (larger than those in Latane and Darley's experiments)" b1 p198
"observation of an emergency creates a state of arousal in bystanders ... [becoming] more unpleasant the longer it continue, but can be reduced by a response based on a calculation of of the relative costs and rewards of that response"
this suggests helping behaviour is motivated by the empathetic discomfort experienced by the bystander as opposed to an inherent moral obligation
"...used a wide range of physiological meaures to demonstate how the arousal response involves a strong emotional component - a 'defence reaction' their work thus pointed to the
overlap between social, psychological and biological aspects of psychology in the explanation of helping behaviour
b1 p198
"argued that pure altriusm is almost impossible" b1 p200
"Robert Cialdini and colleagues... reject the suggestion that selflessly motivated helping is possible, and instead suggest egoistic motivations." b1 p200
Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis b1 p200
while reducing personal distress aroused by another's need serves egoistic motives, perspective taking and empathic concern serve altruistic ones
Coke et al (1978) "reported that feelings of empathy led to increased rates of helping" b1 p201
correlations to personality
the 'helpfulness' factor of Lou Penner (2002)'s prosocial personal battery (PSB) b1 p202
"scores on the PSB have been found to correlate with a number of behaviours, such as the speed of response in simulated emergencies, everyday acts of helping, helping co-workers and the willingnes to be an organ donor (Penner 2002)" b1 p202
Items on this scale are very specific and circumstantial, reliant on chance events occurring/opportunities presenting themselves to an individual to demonstrate such behaviours necessary to score highly on this scale
perhaps a measure of attitude would tap into altruistic tendencies better than sporadic opportunities to demonstrate particular behaviours
previous research "studied how a very specific personality trait related to a very specific kind of helping", subsequent replications failed to find a significant relationship because they "often involved a quite different form of helping" b1 p204
"these replications failed...not because personality is unrelated to helping, but rather because the salient characteristic of the criterion measure had changed" b1 p204
"thus perhaps what the null results really showed is that one relatively specific personality trait is unlikely to to be related to a wide range of helping behaviours (penner 2002) b1 p204
Genetics
"Dawkins (1976) described humans as 'survival machines'... programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes... this gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour b1 p204
epigenetics - how the environment regulates how particular genes work within an individual's lifetime b3 p99
"the environment causes certain genes to become active, which leads to organism to search out different environments" b3 p99
an example of the interplay between nature (genetics) and nurture (the environment)
unlike other animals, humans frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated stangers... with people they will never meet again and where there is no personal benefit" b1 p205
'the altriusm gene' b1 p206
Inclusive fitness theory (Hamilton 1964)
as well as preserving genes through reproduction, helping close relatives survive and reproduce also serves this purpose "
co-efficient of relatedness
"given that we receive half of our genome from our parents, the likelihood of passing on the a gene or genes for altruism to an offspring would be 50 per cent, (25 per cent for grandchildren, 12.5 per cent in a great grandchild, 50 per cent for siblings, etc) b1 p206
"natural selection will favour an altruism gene if the benefits of the atruism causes, weighted by the 'coefficient of relatedness', between helper and helped, outweight the costs" b1 p206
"in the past, natural selection may have favoured a gene for parental care for children, even at cost to itself, as it ensured the survival of that gene" b1 p206
'Reciprocal altruism' b1 p206
Trivers (1971) argues that altruism toward strangers could have evolved if there was a chance of being in a situation where someone who had been helped would then reciprocate" b1 p206
sharing of food with strangers during times of plenty could be a useful strategy to ensure that others help you in time of famine. b1 p206
this is inconsistent with Macaulay and Berkowitz's definition of altruism as it anticipates rewards from external sources, therefore selfishly motivated?
"in summary the evidence suggests that a simple 'genes plus environnment' model fails to explain all the variation we see in an individual" b3 p100
relationship between altriusim and morality?
Parenting
rewards given to children can have in impact on helping behaviours b1 p207
8 year old children who were told that they were a 'nice person' after they had donated marbles sored more highly on a subsequent measure of generalised altruism than children who were told their marble donation was a 'nice thing to do'. b1 p207
this suggests that altruism is learnt (or at least enhanced) through internalisation/identification with this virtue
morality
"we have an internal moral compass we can consult and being judgemental comes relatively easily to us" b3 p95
distinct from social convention? - some overlap
"in all the cultures Turial examined, children made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules, even though the content of those rules varied" b3 p105
Turiel argued that children recognise that rules about clothing, food and many other aspects of life are social conventions, which by their nature are arbtitrary and changeable b3 p105
"children go through specific stages of moral development" b3 p95 (developmental)
Kohlberg's six stage progression b3 p103
stage 3 The morality of interpersonal concordance: be consideration, nice and kid: you'll make friends
stage 4 the morality of law and duty to the social order: everyone in society is obligated to and protected by law
stage 2 the morality of instrumental concordance and simple exchange
"what's in it for me"? morality is transactional and motivated by person gain. does this reasoning qualify as 'morality' at this stage?
stage 5 the morality of consensus-building procedures: you are obligated by the arrangements that are agreed to by due procedures
stage 1: the morality of obedience: do what you're told
stage 6 the morality of non-arbitrary social cooperation: morality is defined by how rational and impartial people would ideally organise cooperation
how does this development of a moral sense relate to the development of the Jungian shadow? - independent source? (integrate a psychodynamic perspective)
stages emerge from gradual immersion into the broader social world, (a 'chipping away' at the shadow)
critisized for having no relevance for sociocentric societies
"after puberty children become capable of abstract thought... in this stage children have begun to base their explanations on the
spirit
of the law rather than the
letter
of the law." b3 p104
i.e., they move beyond understanding morality holistically, developing a generalisable moral sense beyond the sum of its parts (individual rules)
"Piaget thought this shift was achieved by a decline in egocentricism and a corresponding increase in the ability to to take roles and assume anothers perspective" b3 p104
"in the two 'post conventional' stages, adolescents typically value honesty, and respect laws and rules. Importantly, however, they can also justify when these rules should be disregarded if they are at odds with higher values such as justice and fairness" b3 p104
"in this period, children are learning to weigh competing moral motivations, for example, 'be kind' versus 'tell the truth'. b3 p104
"individuals show increased expertise in moral reasoning and, in Kohlberg's view, become 'moral philosophers' who are trying to work out a coherent ethical system for themselves" b3 p104
"researchers must be sure they are actually measuring something about development rather than measuring the child's increasing ability to complete the task" (the issue of task demands) b3 p 104
Elliot Turiel did this by using simplified versions of Kohlberg's stories, requiring simple yes/no answers from participants, 'controlling' for language development. b3 p105
the 'convention domain' - composed of behavioural uniformities that seem to cooridnate social interactions in social systems
children as young as 5 say that breaking rules regarding school uniform is acceptable if permission is granted by a teacher b3 p105
"when observing a social convention violation, children must infer wrongness of behaviour from features outside of the event" b3 p105
outsourcing responsbilitiy to authority figures
the distinctions between these two classifications are blurry within cultures and vary even more so across cultures
"the distinction between the moral and mere convention is not fundamental to moral development but is a cultural artefact - a by-product of the way society is organised" b3 p118
The 'moral domain' - a moral sense that is thought to relate to issues of harm, fairness and rights. b3 p105
"if you ask children about actions that hurt others - a girl who pushes a boy off of a swing because she wants to use it - nearly all of the children say the girl was wrong" even if permitted by the children b3 p105
"when faced with a moral transgression, children work out the direct consequences of the act any may arrive at the conclusion it was wrong" b3 p104
conscience
children have strong moral convictions regarding causing harm, irrespective of approval//disapproval of a third party authority figure.
"Damon (1977) found that young children reject parental commands to engage in acts that violate moral rules, such as instructions to steal or cause harm to another person" b3 p105
"children learn to take a critical perspective of authority especially when it conflicts with moral
intuitions
"
is there a discrepancy between moral judgement and moral behaviour here? social desirability bias? these instances of behaviour are actually quite common among children.
[Turiel] argues that "moral rules are special, unalterable and universal (i.e, not culturally specific)
cultural variation
how to cultural attitudes of child marriage and marital rape fit into this generalisation? there are clear considerations of harm which qualify such issues as moral
sociocentric approach
"practises relating to food, sex, clothing and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues rather than social conventions" b3 p112
individualistic approach
"the moral order is constructed around the protection of individuals and their personal freedom" p 113
Haidt and Joseph (2004) suggest... dimensions of morality that are... universal but also modified by culture b3 p113
Moral foundations theory (MFT):
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"societal shifts in attitude can mean that issues that were once considered amoral take on a moralised nature: advertising to children, fracking, plastic bags, violence on television, IQ tests, wearing fur, and food additives
evidence that a moral sense is not innate or inherent and is it fact socio-culturally and historically situated as attitudes have changed so radically
these shifts have accelerated since widespread decline in christianity and a corresponding rise in atheism
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Nietzsche predicted the delayed degeneration of culture resulting from this shift and a spirutually starved society
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At the same time, many behaviours have moved in the opposite direction, switching from moral wrongdoing to a lifestyle choice: divorce, illegitimatcy, marijuana use, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex and
atheism
Turiel's (1983) experiements
"in the 'moral rule' scenario this authority does not matter but in the 'social convention' scenario it does" b3 p106
answering to a transcendental authority, a conscience given to us by god
"four- to six-year-olds are happy to accept commands to stop fighting (a moral issue) as equally legitimate whether those commands come from adults or children (Laupa et al., 1995). However, when it comes to turn-taking or interpretation of game rules (a conventioanal issue) children give priority to adults." b3 p107
moral 'rules' are more black and white and evaluated on the basis of consequence/outcome as oppose to convention which draws upon abstract social principles.
"even infants demonstrate remarkable prosocial tendencies, for example picking up accidentally dropped objects or opening a door for an adult" b3 p121
it should be noted that "human children's cooperative nature is remarkable when
compared
with other great apes" b3 p123
there is a distinction between what people say they will do (moral judgement) and what they actually do (moral behaviour) b3 p95
is often intuitive and transcends logic or reasoning
what haidt calls 'moral dumbfounding' - a gut reaction that an act or thought is morally wrong, but an inability to articulate why it is wrong
"moral reasoning was mostly an after-the-fact search for justifying the decision they have already made" b3 p127
Nativism (inherent)
Definition: "knowledge that is organised in advance of experience. it argues moral knowledge and emotions are instinct; a product of our evolutionary history with a strong genetic basis" b3 p98
similiar to altruism, is it innate and then built upon by experience?
"we have the capacity to acquire a human repertoire of moral sentiments
and
that these are shaped by the particular social and cultural contexts within which a person lives" b3 p99
Empiricism (learnt)
Definition: "focus on knowledge gained from observation or experience. Empiricism argues that whatever morals we have as adults must have been learned during childhood. Under this view moral development can be thought of as a process of aqcuiring behaviours as internalising the standards and values of a society" b3 p98
morality is solely derived from environmental feedback, we are conditioned by social responses such as outrage or scolding, and this alone is sufficient for the formation of a moral sense
"what is considered right and wrong varies between cultures" b3 p98
rationalism
"children work out morality for themselves or 'construct' it" b3 p100
"through experience of collaboration and competition with one another, children begin to construct a sense of fairness" b3 p101
feedback from peers punishes 'cheating' or social rule breaking and rewards fair play and honesty
children who collaborated to obtain marbles attached to the end of a rope who gained an extra marble would offer it (50% of two-year olds and 70% of three year olds) would offer their collaborator the 'spare' marble to evenly share the rewards b3 p126
chimpanzees do not share the spoils on the same task, although the 'rewards' were food which may therefore affect motivations to 'play fair' (considerations of food scarcity, the role of hunger as a more primordial drive - would the use of food in the human trial therefore make the study more valid?
"moral knowledge is self-constructed through interaction with others" b3 p101
rationalism proposes that we wrestle with this feedback to construct our own generalisable 'rules', as opposed to a passive process of conditioning, there is an evaluative dimension.
piaget argues that children lack the cognitive capacity to grasp the concept of morality in its complexity b3 p101
informed by his experiments which revealed children's inability to grasp concepts such as the 'principle of conservation' b3 p101
"the development of moral understanding could be described by the same framework of stage-like progression he had described for the physical world. just as a three year old is not at the right stage to understand the conservation task, so they are not ready to grasp the concept of fairness" b3 p101
"when deciding how to divide resources children start out by using the rule of thumb 'fair is equal'... by five or six years of age children have a more sophisticated understanding of what constitutes a fair share ... the concept of fairness takes account of of the recipient's need, merit and amount of work they have put in to obtaining the resource" b3 p125
"childrens thinking is qualitatively different from adults" b3 p101
formation of the Freudian super-ego
definitions
"Turiel defines moral rules as relating to 'justice, right and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other" b3 p105
is morality/prosocial behaviour learnt?
learning definitions/types b2 p 161
associative learning - learning about the stimulus by exposure to that stimulus
conditioning
prosocial/moral behaviour could be learnt by positive reinforcement or punishing (e.g., scolded for taking a cookie, praised for sharing them)
we can also learn from witnessing the results of other people's behaviour and their consequences
"there is a growing body of evidence that an individuals behaviour is also affected by what happens to another individual" b2 p179
"Gerull and Rapee showed toddlers toy snakes and spiders while their mother expressed fear of one type of toy but not the other type. Later the toddlers were frightened when they saw the toy their mother had apparently been afraid of" b2 p179
in a similar way, children learn vicariously through how peers are punished or rewarded for socially un/desirable behaviour as they become increasingly immersed in the social world (particular when joining institutions such as schools where such behaviours are formally/explicitly enforced.
pro/antisocial behaviour and its consequences are also modelled through 'cultural ratchets' (elaborate if using) such a story telling and myths which follow a pattern of reward and success for the heroic protagonist and failure and misfortune for the villain.
for example, in Hamlin et al's (2007) puppet show children showed a preference for a puppet displaying prosocial behaviour (helping the climber) vs the 'hinderer' puppet who bashed the climber down the hill b3 p124
the 'good vs bad' dichotomy feature heavily in popular media including those aimed at children
how can prosocial behaviour be understood in terms of conditioning?
Unconditional response (UR)
positive feelings resulting from praise (a natural, automatic emotional reaction)
such behaviours are also self-reinforced as individuals find increasing social success resulting from altruistic displays
conditional stimulus (CS)
sharing a cookie begins as a neutral action, but becomes paired/associated with the positive experience of praise from the mother
what motivates the initial instance of this 'neutral' behaviour?
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unconditional stimulus (US)
a mother praising a child for sharing
Conditional response
the child feels happy and proud from the act of sharing a cookie alone, even in the absense of the mothers praise
demonstrated to be effective with human babies by Tsao and colleagues' experiments using the 'head turning technique' b2 p171
relates to parenting practises and the marble sharing experiment b1 p207
punishment
demonstrated by animal studies using the skinner box b2 p170
"the rats behaviour might be followed by a an unpleasant consequence, a loud noise for example, and then the likelihood of that behaviour reoccuring will be less" b2 p170
akin to 'time out' or a deduction of pocket money for taking a cookie from a sibling
"the behaviourist interpretation of this behaviour would be that prosociality has been encouraged through a system of rewards and punishment" b3 p123
"however, in a recent study, the helpfulness of 20-month-old children
decreased
when they were materially rewarded for their helpful behaviour" b3 p123
helping 'for the sake of helping' (i.e, expression of altruistic tendencies) may therefore be a stronger motivator of behaviour than positive reinforcement (conditioning)
learning rooted in empiricism
"the natural environment contains lots of events that occur together and associative learning allows animals to pick out the really important events, such as good predictors of food, predators, potential mates etc" b2 p175
social learning - a theory of learning based on observing and imiating the behaviour of others
imitative learning
collaborative learning
perceptual learning - learning about a stimulus by exposure to that stimulus
"Dwyer and Vladeanu carried out an experiment where participants were required to identify a particular face from a set of similiar looking faces. They reported that, if the participants had seen the face before, they performed much better" b2 p164
this demonstrates our capacity to remember faces
learning - a change, or potential change, in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience
"humans and other animals are not passive viewers of their environment. They do not sit back and calculate what might happen next; rather, they are active and seek to control what happens. It is important, therefore, to be able to predict the effects of ones actions" b2 p176
prosocial behaviour could therefore be understood as learnt patterns of behaviour, motivated by anticipation of correspondingly positive consequences
in the context of children's collaboration and competition, these positive consequences could be subsequent invitation to future collaboration/competition or social inclusion more generally as well as reciprocated respect and fair play
children learn through structured play, 'rules' provide this structure. when they are broken/dismissed this structure breaks down and the game is no longer fun
"children want to participate in joint activities and show commitment to them...if cooperation breaks down they will try and re-engage their partner" b3 p121
"this is true even when the activity does not require two people to achieve the goal" b3 p121
"are we naturally selfish or cooperative? this an age-old philosophical debate known as the 'perfectibility of man'. Either human nature is essentially selfish and individualistic, unless tamed by culture, or humans are born virtuous and corrupted by society" b3 p120
"this kind of either-or thinking doesnt do justice to the complexity of the situation" b3 p120
"young children are both competitive and cooperative" b3 p121
from a religious point of view i would argue the latter, symbolised by the biblical expulsion of adam and eve from the garden of eden due to the origianll sin
'normativity (i.e, behaviour considered to be right or wrong) modifies learnt behaviour through "uniquely human processes that underlie the establishment and maintenance of social groups"
in the example of football fans, clapping when you're team scores, showing disappointment when the opposition does. Watching the game for a particular position in the stadium, wearing your teams shirt etc are all prescribed as the 'right' way to behave