Prosocial Behavior: Helping Others

• Social influence is how others affect one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, either through their presence or actions.

Status and Social Power

• Status is the importance of an individual's position within a group, as perceived by its members.
• An individual's status can determine the amount of power they wield within a group, thereby influencing the group's behavior.
• Power is an individual's or group's ability to control or influence the thoughts, feelings, or behavior of another person or group.

Types of Social Power

• Reward power involves the ability to provide positive or remove negative consequences in response to specific behavior.
• Coercive power is connected to the ability to give negative or remove positive consequences based on particular actions.
• Legitimate power stems from a person's status or position within a group, institution, or society, giving them authority.
• Referent power comes from individuals wanting to identify with or be liked by someone.
• Expert power is derived from having special knowledge and skills that are needed and desirable.
• Informational power includes having useful resources or information that is not readily available elsewhere.

Power and Cognitive Function

• A 2017 study showed the students wearing police uniforms or mechanic overalls, and performed a distracting task.
• The study participants were biased toward low socioeconomic distractors only when they were wearing police uniforms.
• Power influences the brain's cognitive functions.
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) revealed that high power participants had decreased mirroring activity in the motor areas of the brain.
• Power reduces the brain's attention or sensitivity to others,potentially leading to "neural shortcuts" such as stereotypes.

Helping Behavior

• Helping behaviors includes actions or gestures aimed at providing assistance, support, or aid to others in need.
• Helping others releases oxytocin, boosting dopamine and serotonin, thus triggering feelings of happiness and pleasure, counteracting cortisol, and decreasing blood pressure.

Types of Helping Behaviors

• Physical help involves aiding with tasks or providing physical assistance.
• Emotional support includes listening, offering empathy, and providing encouragement.
• Informational help includes sharing knowledge and providing guidance.
• Financial assistance can include offering resources, donating, or fundraising.
• Volunteering is contributing to society through community service or volunteer work.

Benefits of Helping

• Personal growth and development of empathy, compassion, and a sense of fulfillment is achieved by helping others.
• Building relationships is done by strengthening relationships through care, support, and understanding.
• Creating positive communities by contributing to a culture of kindness, cooperation, and mutual respect within schools and communities
• Improving mental health by enhancing well-being, reducing stress, increasing self-esteem, and fostering a sense of purpose.

Kitty Genovese Case

• Kitty Genovese was attacked at 3 am near her home, stabbed by her attacker.
• She woke up 38 neighbors while screaming and asking for help.
• None of the 38 neighbors helped and only one called the police.

Encouraging Prosocial Behavior

• Noticing the situation includes being aware enough to recognize when someone needs help.
• Interpreting the situation correctly means accurately assessing whether a situation calls for assistance.
• Taking responsibility includes the willingness to intervene and provide help.

Bystander Effect

• Latane and Dabbs (1975) conducted the "lift experiment."
• The bystander effect reflects an individual's tendency to be less likely to help someone in need when other bystanders are present or believed to be present.
• The more bystanders present, the less likely any one of them is to help.
• This indicates that we may diffuse the responsibility to help on to others when in a situation with a lot of people

Neural Basis of the Bystander Effect

• Hortensius and de Gelder (2014) found there was decreased activity in the pre- and postcentral gyri during the bystander effect, using fMRI.
• These areas control motor movements and sensations.
• This demonstrates that the bystander effect includes a neural basis.

Social Factors Influencing Helping

• Helping others often stems from a belief that we ought to help.
• Social norms influence a desire to help, standards that govern what people should or should not do
• Two influencing social norms are the reciprocity norm and the social responsibility norm.

Reciprocity Norm

• An unwritten rule that we should give what we receive or expect to receive.
• The principle means to give mutually and reflects the saying 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Social Responsibility Norm

• This prescribes that we should help those in need because it is our duty to do so.

Personal Factors Influencing Helping

• Empathy makes us feel for someone in need.
• Empathy means the ability to identify with and understand another person’s feelings or difficulties.
• Empathy involves feeling distress or concern for others, and an imagination of what it must be like to be in need of help.
• Mood impacts likelihood to help; people are more likely to help when feeling good.
• Competence indicates skills or knowledge influences willingness to help in specific situations.

Obedience

• Authority figures like parents, teachers, coaches, and employers often compel us to behave in certain ways.
• Obedience is learned from an early age to avoid negative outcomes.
• The use of power or status in these situations produces obedient behavior.

Constructive vs Destructive Obedience

• Constructive obedience results in positive outcomes from following authority.
• Examples include following emergency personnel instructions or citizens adhering to laws.
• Destructive obedience results in negative outcomes from obeying authority.
• Examples include soldiers harming civilians or blindly following harmful public policies.

Milgram's Experiments

• Stanley Milgram(1963) investigated factors which influence obedience to an authority figure.
• There were 19 variations of experimental procedures.
• The aim was to investigate the extent to which individuals would obey authority figures when instructed to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.

Method used by Milgram

• Participants were assigned the role of "teacher".
• An actor, posing as a "learner," was strapped to a chair in another room.
• The teacher was instructed to administrator with electric shocks to the learner for every incorrect answer, which increased in 15-volt increments.
• The experimenter would prod the teacher to continue administering shocks, despite the learner's distress.
• The shocks went from 15 to 450 volts
• The actor responded with increasingly desperate pleas and eventually silence.

Findings of Milgram's Experiment

• Most participants continued to administer shocks up to voltage level (450 volts).
• This was despite believing they were harming the actor.
• Many participants displayed signs of extreme stress and discomfort but obeyed experimenter's instructions.
• People are surprisingly obedient to authority figures, to the point of performing actions that conflict with personal morals.
• Milgram highlighted the power of authority in shaping behavior and influenced understandings in military, workplace, and hierarchical structure contexts.

Gender and Obedience

• Milgram (1974) found later the adult females showed obedience levels as males, with 65% delivering an electric shock to the maximum intensity of 450 volts.
• Similar results from people in different countries, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds, who are children and elderly in the teacher role.
• Most participants expressed distress yet continued to obey.

Social Proximity in Milgram's Experiment

• Social proximity is the closeness (physical or emotional) between two or more people.
• The likelihood that one refused administering the shock meant the actor was closer to the teacher.

Legitimacy of Authority Figures in Milgram's Experiment

• Individuals are more obedient when the authority figure is perceived as legitimate and having power.
• When an "ordinary person" gave out orders full obedience dropped from 65% to 20%

Group Pressure in Milgram's Experiment

• Individuals are more likely to be obedient when there's little or no group support resisting the authority figure.
• Obedience dropped from 65% to about 10% when participants were exposed disobedient people.

Neural Basis to Obedience

• FMRI scans have shown increased engagement of "social brain regions" in empathy/guilt, like the insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule among the participants to disobeyed orders

Ethical Issues with the Milgram Experiment

• Milgram's experiment breached ethical guidelines due to concerns about informed consent, deception, voluntary participation, withdrawal rights, confidentiality, and debriefing.
• Participants were misinformed and distressed.

Status vs Power

• Status is the level of respect or prestige held within a group.
• Power is the ability to influence or control the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors of others
• A person can have high status and little power
• Power often comes with a high status.

Explore the psychology of helping behaviors, from personal growth to community benefits. Understand the bystander effect, the influence of group dynamics, and the impact of personal interpretation on intervention. Learn how mental health and strong relationships foster prosocial actions.