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Helping and Prosocial Behavior - Coggle Diagram
Helping and Prosocial Behavior
When Do People Help?
Social Obstacles to Helping
Diffusion of Responsibility: The presence of others makes a person feel less personally responsible to intervene.
Pluralistic Ignorance: Relying on the inaction of other bystanders to mistakenly conclude that help is not needed.
Bystander Effect: When no one else does anything, a bystander takes cues from the group and also does nothing.
Key Rule: When Pluralistic Ignorance and Diffusion of Responsibility occur, the likelihood of helping drops drastically.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Likelihood of helping increases if benefits outweigh the costs.
Benefits include gaining social rewards and successfully avoiding guilt.
Who Helps?
Gender Differences
Overall: No statistical difference between men and women in general helping behavior.
Dangerous Situations: Men are physically more likely to offer help.
Prosocial Personality Orientation
Agreeableness: Individuals high in this trait are warm, sympathetic, and significantly more likely to help.
Other-Oriented Empathy: Feeling deep empathy for those in need alongside a strong moral obligation to assist.
Helpfulness: Individuals who have a history of being helpful, believe their help works, and plan to help in the future.
Why Help? (Motivations & Models)
Primary Motives
Altruistic Motives: Actions solely focused on helping the other person as the primary goal.
Egoistic Motives: Actions driven by a desire to satisfy one's own underlying personal needs.
Psychological Models
Negative State Relief Model: Helping others strictly to alleviate our own negative moods or make ourselves feel better.
Empathy-Altruism Model: Taking another's perspective triggers empathic concern, motivating us to reduce their distress even if the personal cost to us is high.
Evolutionary Roots
Kin Selection: Evolutionary favoritism shown by helping genetic relatives who share portions of our DNA.
Reciprocal Altruism: Helping others with the expectation that they will help us in return; aids survival and gene replication.