Social psychologists are interested in answering this question because it is apparent that people vary in their tendency to help others. In 2010 for instance, Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was stabbed when he apparently tried to intervene in an argument between a man and woman. As he lay dying in the street, only one man checked his status, but many others simply glanced at the scene and continued on their way. (One passerby did stop to take a cellphone photo, however.) Unfortunately, failures to come to the aid of someone in need are not unique, as the segments on “What Would You Do?” show. Help is not always forthcoming for those who may need it the most. Trying to understand why people do not always help became the focus of bystander intervention research (e.g., Latané & Darley, 1970).
It turns out that people are influenced to help or not by the situation they are in. For example, to define ambiguous situations (including many emergencies), potential helpers may look to the action of others to decide what should be done. But those others are looking around too, also trying to figure out what to do. Everyone is looking, but no one is acting! Relying on others to define the situation and to then erroneously conclude that no intervention is necessary when help is actually needed is called pluralistic ignorance (Latané & Darley, 1970). When people use the inactions of others to define their own course of action, the resulting pluralistic ignorance leads to less help being given.
Simply being with others may facilitate or inhibit whether we get involved in other ways as well. In situations in which help is needed, the presence or absence of others may affect whether a bystander will assume personal responsibility to give the assistance. If the bystander is alone, personal responsibility to help falls solely on the shoulders of that person. But what if others are present? Although it might seem that having more potential helpers around would increase the chances of the victim getting help, the opposite is often the case. Knowing that someone else could help seems to relieve bystanders of personal responsibility, so bystanders do not intervene. This phenomenon is known as diffusion of responsibility (Darley & Latané, 1968).
There is an extensive body of research showing the negative impact of pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility on helping (Fisher et al., 2011), in both emergencies and everyday need situations. These studies show the tremendous importance potential helpers place on the social situation in which unfortunate events occur, especially when it is not clear what should be done and who should do it. Other people provide important social information about how we should act and what our personal obligations might be. But does knowing a person needs help and accepting responsibility to provide that help mean the person will get assistance? Not necessarily.
Watch the following videos for examples of research on the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility:
Learn about experiments related to the bystander effect.
Learn about the science of empathy.
Is the bystander effect real?
In terms of individual differences that might matter, one obvious question is whether men or women are more likely to help. The general level of helpfulness may be pretty much equivalent between the sexes, but men and women help in different ways (Becker & Eagly, 2004; Eagly & Crowley, 1986). Through socializations, men and women have traditionally been raised to play different social roles that prepare them to respond differently to the needs of others, and people tend to help in ways that are most consistent with their gender roles. Female gender roles encourage women to be compassionate, caring, and nurturing; male gender roles encourage men to take physical risks, to be heroic and chivalrous, and to be protective of those less powerful. As a consequence of social training and the gender roles that people have assumed, men may be more likely to jump onto subway tracks to save a fallen passenger, but women are more likely to give comfort to a friend with personal problems (Diekman & Eagly, 2000; Eagly & Crowley, 1986).
Our evolutionary past may provide keys about why we help (Buss, 2004). Our very survival was no doubt promoted by the prosocial relations with clan and family members, and, as a hereditary consequence, we may now be especially likely to help those closest to us—blood-related relatives with whom we share a genetic heritage. According to evolutionary psychology, we are helpful in ways that increase the chances that our DNA will be passed along to future generations (Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994)—the goal of the “selfish gene” (Dawkins, 1976). Our personal DNA may not always move on, but we can still be successful in getting some portion of our DNA transmitted if our daughters, sons, nephews, nieces, and cousins survive to produce offspring. The favoritism shown for helping our blood relatives is called kin selection (Hamilton, 1964).
However, we also help others who are not related to us - an idea known as reciprocal altruism. Because of reciprocal altruism, we are all better off in the long run if we help one another. If helping someone now increases the chances that you will be helped later, then your overall chances of survival are increased. There is the chance that someone will take advantage of your help and not return your favors. But people seem predisposed to identify those who fail to reciprocate, and punishments including social exclusion may result (Buss, 2004). Cheaters will not enjoy the benefit of help from others, reducing the likelihood of the survival of themselves and their kin. We will learn more about altruism below.
Human nature has created a general tendency for people to enjoy the company of others and to trust, care for, and respect other people. This idea leads us to expect that we will, in most cases, be helpful and cooperative, and perhaps even altruistic. If you are thinking like a social psychologist, you will realize that whether we help or don’t help is not likely to be determined completely by random factors. Rather, these decisions are influenced by the underlying human motivations of protecting the self and reaching out to others. Some of our altruistic behavior is part of our genetic endowment—we help because we are human beings, and human beings (as are many other species) are helpful. In other cases, our helping is more selfish, designed to make ourselves feel better or even to gain rewards such as praise, status, or money. Although we may not completely understand the characteristics of altruism and we cannot always predict who will or will not help others, social psychologists nevertheless have learned a great deal about these determinants.
Altruism refers to any behavior that is designed to increase another person’s welfare, and particularly those actions that do not seem to provide a direct reward to the person who performs them (Batson, Ahmad, & Stocks, 2011; Dovidio, Piliavin, Schroeder, & Penner, 2006; Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, & Schroeder, 2005). Rather than being the exception to the rule, recent research seems to indicate that these kinds of behaviors are intuitive, reflexive, and even automatic (Zaki & Mitchell, 2013). Altruism occurs when we donate blood, when we stop to help a stranger who has been stranded on the highway, when we volunteer at a homeless shelter or donate to a charity, or when we get involved to prevent a crime from occurring. Every day there are numerous acts of helping that occur all around us. As we will see, some of these represent true altruism, whereas others represent helping that is motivated more by self-concern. And, of course, there are also times when we do not help at all, seeming to not care about the needs of others.
Helping is strongly influenced by affective variables. Indeed, the parts of the brain that are most involved in empathy, altruism, and helping are the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, areas that are responsible for emotion and emotion regulation.
Watch the following video on some research on altruism:
Is the tendency to help others, at least in part, a basic feature of human nature? Evolutionary psychologists believe so. They argue that although helping others can be costly to us as individuals, altruism does have a clear benefit for the group as a whole. Remember that in an evolutionary sense the survival of the individual is less important than the survival of the individual’s genes (McAndrew, 2002). Therefore, if a given behavior such as altruism enhances our reproductive success by helping the species as a whole survive and prosper, then that behavior is likely to increase fitness, be passed on to subsequent generations, and become part of human nature. People are more likely to donate kidneys to relatives than to strangers (Borgida, Conner, & Manteufel, 1992), and even children indicate that they are more likely to help their siblings than they are to help a friend (Tisak & Tisak, 1996). We help friends more than we help strangers, we help members of our ingroups more than we help members of outgroups, and we are even more likely to help strangers who are more similar to us (Dovidio et al., 1997; Krupp, DeBruine, & Barclay, 2008; Sturmer, Snyder, Kropp, & Siem, 2006). It is quite possible that similarity is an important determinant of helping because we use it as a marker—although not a perfect one—that people share genes with us (Park & Schaller, 2005; Van Vugt & Van Lange, 2006).
Although it seems logical that we would help people we are related to or those we perceive as similar to us, why would we ever help people to whom we are not related? One explanation for such behavior is based on the principle of reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Reciprocal altruism is the idea that if we help other people now, they will return the favor should we need their help in the future. Thus by helping others, we both increase our chances of survival and reproductive success and help others increase their chances of survival too. Over the course of evolution, those who engage in reciprocal altruism should be able to reproduce more often than those who do not, thus enabling this kind of altruism to continue. Reciprocal altruism means that people even may help total strangers, based on the assumption that doing so is useful because it may lead others to help them (when help is most needed) in the future.
One fact that might help convince you that altruism is in fact evolutionarily adaptive is that many animals also engage in reciprocal altruism. Birds emit an alarm to nearby birds to warn them of a predator even at a potential cost to themselves. Dolphins may support sick or injured animals by swimming under them and pushing them to the surface so they can breathe. Male baboons threaten predators and guard the rear of the troop as it retreats. And even bats have a buddy system in which a bat that has had a successful night of feeding will regurgitate food for its less fortunate companion (Wilkinson, 1990).
Reciprocal altruism is one example of the general principle of social exchange. We frequently use each other to gain rewards and to help protect ourselves from harm, and helping is one type of benefit that we can provide to others. In some cases, this exchange reflects overt cooperation, such as when two students take notes for each other in classes that they miss or when neighbors care for each other’s pets while one of them is away. In other cases, the exchange may be more subtle and indirect: for instance, when we help someone we don’t really know, with the expectation that someone else may help us in return someday.
The principles of social learning suggest that people will be more likely to help when they receive rewards for doing so. Parents certainly realize this—children who share their toys with others are praised, whereas those who act more selfishly are reprimanded. And research has found that we are more likely to help attractive rather than unattractive people of the other sex (Farrelly, Lazarus, & Roberts, 2007)—again probably because it is rewarding to do so.
The costs of helping are especially high when the situation is potentially dangerous or when the helping involves a long-term commitment to the person in need, such as when we decide to take care of a very ill person. Because helping strangers is particularly costly, some European countries have enacted Good Samaritan laws that increase the costs of not helping others. These laws require people to provide or call for aid in an emergency if they can do so without endangering themselves in the process, with the threat of a fine or other punishment if they do not. Many countries and states also have passed “angel of mercy” laws that decrease the costs of helping and encourage people to intervene in emergencies by offering them protection from the law if their actions turn out not to be helpful or even harmful. For instance, in Germany, a failure to provide first aid to someone in need is punishable by a fine. Furthermore, to encourage people to help in any way possible, the individual providing assistance cannot be prosecuted even if he or she made the situation worse or did not follow proper first aid guidelines (Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz, 2014).
There are still other types of rewards that we gain from helping others. One is the status we gain as a result of helping. Altruistic behaviors serve as a type of signal about the altruist’s personal qualities. If good people are also helpful people, then helping implies something good about the helper. When we act altruistically, we gain a reputation as a person with high status who is able and willing to help others, and this status makes us better and more desirable in the eyes of others. Hardy and Van Vugt (2006) found that both men and women were more likely to make cooperative rather than competitive choices in games that they played with others when their responses were public rather than private. Furthermore, when the participants made their cooperative choices in public, the participants who had been more cooperative were also judged by the other players as having higher social status than were the participants who had been less cooperative.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the opportunities for voluntourism where people travel and do service work. There are different opportunities from planting trees to building wells to helping in orphanages. However, this type of volunteering has also come under scrutiny. Learn more below:
Coghlan, A., & Fennell, D. (2009). Myth or substance: An examination of altruism as the basis of volunteer tourism. Annals of leisure research, 12(3-4), 377-402.
Wearing, S. & McGehee, N. G. (2013). Volunteer tourism: A review. Tourism Management, 38, 120-130.
The business of voluntourism: do western do-gooders actually do harm? (The Guardian, 2018)
Watch this TEDx talk about the dark side of volunteering abroad
Watch this TEDx talk about this speaker's experience with voluntourism
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