Social Psychology 2023 (Session 6) PDF

Social Psychology Social psychology is the branch of psychological science mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors Social psychology is a huge area (and one this university is very active in). We are going to look at three topics s...

Social Psychology Social psychology is the branch of psychological science mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors Social psychology is a huge area (and one this university is very active in). We are going to look at three topics social attitudes (esp. stereotyping and prejudice) social cognition, conformity and obedience peace & conflict (especially helping behaviours). In our studies of conformity and obedience, we are going to run into some of the giants of social psychology: Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo. How did it all begin? We like to think of modern psychology as starting in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt set up his lab. Social psychology probably started a bit later than this. Wilhelm Wundt from 1900 to 1920 encouraged the study of language and its influence on the social being. In 1908 McDougall wrote An Introduction to Social Psychology, although it may be personality theorist Gordon Allport’s 1924 book “Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspects“ that kicked off our modern understanding of social psychology. (He was also Stanley Milgram’s teacher). Stereotyping and prejudice Big idea For the next two sections (stereotyping and social cognitions) you will repeatedly hear that we use cognitive short cuts to navigate the social world. Typically, we do this very successfully, but occasionally (e.g., prejudice or base rate fallacies) it encourages us to think incorrectly and even act (e.g., discrimination) badly. Attitudes: What is the difference between stereotypes and prejudice Stereotypes are about the group Prejudice is about the individual Robert Biswas-Denier: As an aside, the fellow who wrote the introduction to social psychology section in your textbook on stereotyping is better known for his work on income and happiness. My comments on Lyubomirsky's current circumstances and happiness are from his research. Stereotypes: intellectual short cuts, we all use them, can be positive, negative, or neutral Stereotyping is a way of using information shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions. “For instance, you might hold a stereotype that elderly people are physically slower and frailer than twenty-year-olds. If so, you are more likely to treat interactions with the elderly in a different manner than interactions with younger people. Although you might delight in jumping on your friend’s back, punching a buddy in the arm, or jumping out and scaring a friend you probably do not engage in these behaviors with the elderly. Stereotypical information may or may not be correct, may be positive or negative. It is important to keep in mind, however, that stereotypes, even if they are correct in general, likely do not apply to every member of the group”. (Textbook, p. 694). Prejudice- to pre-judge the individual Prejudice: How I feel about an individual because of group membership. “I don’t like Frank, You know you just can’t trust indigenous people.” You can have prejudices that are positive. “Oh, I’ll love Jenny. You know Asians; they are so smart.” But even if positive, I’m making an assumptions about someone because of their group membership and that can feel insulting. How would Jenny feel if I said “Hey, can you help me with my stats? You Asians are so good with numbers.” Group/individual and cognitions/emotions When making the distinction between stereotypes and prejudice I tend to emphasize that it is the difference between the group and the individual. Susan Fiske, a very well respected researcher in stereotyping and author of a later section, emphasizes that stereotypes are cognitive bias whereas prejudice is an emotional bias. I feel uncomfortable around someone different from me. Group /Individual and Cognition/Emotion I really like Fiske. Reading her has changed some of my thinking, but I respectfully disagree with her here. First, as an instructor, it confuses students to read Biswar-Denier write prejudice is about how we feel about an individual because of group membership on one page, and then just a few pages later have Fiske say you can have prejudice against a group. Second, it just isn’t how the field uses the term. The person who is arguably the father of social psychology, Gordon Allport stated prejudice is our attitude towards an individual because of group membership and we have stuck with that ever since. So at least in this course, and the exams in this course, prejudice is my feelings or beliefs about an individual. Encyclopedia of Child Psychology Prejudice is a preconceived attitude that has commonly been used in referring to judgments of one’s race, but is also used when referring to sex, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. The most comprehensive and accepted definition of prejudice was introduced by Gordon Allport. Mr. Allport defined prejudice as “aversive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to that group.” Discrimination: Acting on my prejudice Discrimination “For instance, if you were to learn that a person has gone to rehabilitation for alcohol treatment, it might be unfair to treat him or her as untrustworthy. You might hold a stereotype that people who have been involved with drugs are untrustworthy or that they have an arrest record. Discrimination would come when you act on that stereotype by, for example, refusing to hire the person for a job for which they are otherwise qualified” (p. 694 textbook) Social Cognition Social cognition is the area of social psychology that examines how people perceive and think about their social world. Of course, this is a bit tricky. I don’t have direct access to what people are thinking or feeling. There is a bit of guessing. When we make educated guesses about the efforts or motives of others, this is called social attribution. Fundamental Attribution Error: Everyone who drives faster than me is irresponsible, but when I speed it is for very good reasons. Fundamental attribution error The consistent way we attribute other people’s actions to personality traits while overlooking situational influences is called the fundamental attribution error. Schemas and heuristics: We use mental short-cuts to quickly make sense of the world. Often they work great, but because of things like base-rate errors, availability heuristics, or priming they can sometimes encourage us to make mistakes about people and things. Schemas & Heuristics Jean Piaget Schemas “A schema is a mental model, or representation, of any of the various things we come across in our daily.” (Textbook p.702). Assimilation and accommodation We use two processes to adapt to new experiences: we try to assimilate the new information into our old schemas; or we accommodate the new information by changing our schemas. Heuristics Mental shortcuts that reduce complex problem-solving to more simple, rule based decisions. Schemas and heuristics Schemas are knowledge structures (dogs are four legged furry animals with wet noses). Heuristics are mental short cuts, rules of thumb. (If it is expensive, it most be good quality.) We use both to reduce our cognitive load but schemas can be very complex. Schemas and heuristics This sounds great. How could cognitive short-cuts be a bad thing? Representativeness heuristics: Sort of like the platonic ideal? Representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood of the object belonging to a category, based on how similar it is to one’s mental representation of that category. In your mind, you may have an idea of the typical truck driver or professor looks like. And most of the time your are right, but…. But decisions automatically made on representational heuristics don’t take into account how often something occurs, the base rate of events if you will. But representation heuristics don’t take into account base rates I loved your textbook’s example of an English professor, perhaps because I’m in a town without a university. My decision of whether someone is an English professor or not needs to consider what the number of English professors in the population is. So I am at a local restaurant, and I see a thin fellow with glasses reading Sylvia Plath. That fits my representational heuristics of an English professor, and without thinking stereotypes or heuristics I immediately think “That guy is an English prof.” Now I live in a town of 18,000 people that has 1,000 truck drivers and 0 English professors. It is very likely this gentleman is actually a truck driver. He could be an English professor just driving through, but the chance of that being correct is still just 1/18,000. Representational heuristics led me to wrongly judge someone. Base rate fallacy Our premier Scott Moe just gave an eloquent example of the dangers of base rate fallacies when he stated he didn’t think vaccines protect you from infection from COVID-19 after all half of the people who are hospitalized with COVID-19 are vaccinated. Umm, but the unvaccinated, like English professors, are the minority of the population. The unvaccinated make up 20% of the population but make up 50% of the hospitalized (and the vast majority of those in ICUs). The doctor who replied to this very nicely explained base rates when he stated think of this as a fraction. The base or denominator is your population, your numerator your variable of interest. So thinking in thousands you have the vaccinated (30/1,000) and the unvaccinated (30/200). So how do base rates play into stereotypes and prejudice Think of the example I gave of the female physician being treated differently because her patient assumed (had a heuristic) doctors are men, you must be a nurse. But in my teaching clinic 9/10 times the person who comes in with a preceptor is a physician. What is the chance (1/10) this person is a nurse? We need to balance our automatic assumptions (heuristics) with our slower thinking about “what is the chance of this happening?” Availability heuristics Ok OK, I have to think about the chance something will happen: easy or is it? “A commonly employed heuristic for making this type of judgment is called the availability heuristic. People use the availability heuristic to evaluate the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily instances of it come to mind (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Because more commonly occurring events are more likely to be cognitively accessible (or, they come to mind more easily), use of the availability heuristic can lead to relatively good approximations of frequency” (Textbook, p. 703). Availability heuristics: they are great, but they too occasionally lead us astray Well… usually. Sometimes social events are very highly publicized or sensational so they are more accessible even though less common. We make this mistake in gun control arguments. Many people believe that we should make gun ownership easier so we can protect ourselves against criminals. True, people do get killed by criminals in gang violence and home invasions, but it is exceedingly rare. In fact, the most common gun deaths in Canada are suicides (80.1 % according to Stats Can) and of the 12.4% that were homicides many of those were crimes of passion by people who were not career criminals. Having guns available actually increase the risks of completed suicides and crimes of passion, not reduce the risk. Priming Like classical conditioning, when two concepts or behaviours are repeatedly put together presenting one primes you (or makes it more cognitively accessible to you) to think of the other. Sometimes this is benign. People who see the word doctor, are quicker to see the word nurse flash across a computer screen. It can also be part of prejudice. “In a now classic study, Patricia Devine (1989) primed study participants with words typically associated with Blacks (e.g.,“blues,” “basketball”) in order to activate the stereotype of Blacks. Devine found that study participants who were primed with the Black stereotype judged a target’s ambiguous behaviors as being more hostile (a trait stereotypically associated with Blacks) than nonprimed participants. Research in this area suggests that our social context—which constantly bombards us with concepts—may prime us to form particular judgments and influence our thoughts and behaviors” (Textbook. P. 707). I suspect this is why prisoners have died in custody when they were having epileptic seizures or heart attacks but assumed to just be drunk or high. What is the take away here? At important times, question your automatic assumptions Our brain is designed to (usually correctly) make quick decisions about the world, including the social world. But especially in important decisions we need to challenge our automatic responses. Is this truck driver really like “every other truck driver I’ve met.” How common is gang violence in my neighbourhood? By recognizing we naturally stereotype and over estimate salient events, we can catch ourselves when we over generalize. So mental short cuts typically work, but occasionally result in incorrect social judgements. The same is true of emotions which are so important and helpful but also distort my thinking including my thinking about other people. Hot Cognition: The Influence of Motivations, Mood, and Desires on Social Judgment Our goals and beliefs can lead to motivated skepticism, whereby we are skeptical of evidence that goes against what we want to believe. Despite our best efforts, we are more critical of things that go against what we presently believe, and less critical of things that agree with what we already believe. A final word on social heuristics and schemas. Your textbooks ends stating in general they work well for us. “In general, we make predictions about others quickly, based on relatively little information. Research on “thin-slice judgments” has shown that perceivers are able to make surprisingly accurate inferences about another person’s emotional state, personality traits, and even sexual orientation based on just snippets of information—for example, a 10-second video clip (Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000; Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999; Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993). Furthermore, these judgments are predictive of the target’s future behaviors. For example, one study found that students’ ratings of a teacher’s warmth, enthusiasm, and attentiveness from a 30-second video clip strongly predicted that teacher’s final student evaluations after an entire semester (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993). As might be expected, the more information there is available, the more accurate many of these judgments become (Carney, Colvin, & Hall, 2007)” (Textbook, p. 703). Self-judgements If we are good at judging others with little information, we must be great at judging ourselves, including predicting future behaviour. Actually, in general we are good, typically better than our peers at knowing our own interests and behaviours BUT we tend to have a couple blind spots. Planning fallacy: It takes longer than you think We tend to underestimate how much time it will take us to complete a task, whether it is writing a paper, finishing a project at work, or building a bridge—a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. This has both good and bad consequences. Yes, it has led to a lot of all nighters for students grinding it out to finish their essays, but it also leads to ambitious behaviours. If we really knew how long or involved a lot of our projects would take, we might never start them. Affective forecasting: Our feelings are not as strong or as long lasting as we think Predictions about future feelings are influenced by the impact bias: the tendency for a person to overestimate the intensity of their future feelings. Affective forecasting: durability bias “The durability bias refers to the tendency for people to overestimate how long (or the duration) positive and negative events will affect them. This bias is much greater for predictions regarding negative events than positive events, and occurs because people are generally unaware of the many psychological mechanisms that help us adapt to and cope with negative events” (Textbook, p. 704) Measuring implicit attitudes Implicit Attitudes My beliefs or stereotypes are sometimes conscious but not always. I can have biases I’m not entirely aware of, and with things like racism or sexism it gets even more tricky because I also know what is socially acceptable. A social scientist can’t just ask me “Are you racist?” because I don’t want to admit that, not even to myself. How many racist comments start with “I’m not racist, but…” So how do social scientists measure implicit (not plainly expressed) attitudes? (Keep this slide in the back of your mind. I have a few issues with it that I want to come back to) Measuring implicit attitudes through reaction times Implicit measures infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it. Many implicit measures accomplish this by recording the time it takes a participant (i.e., the reaction time) to label or categorize an attitude object (i.e., the person, concept, or object of interest) as positive or negative. For example, the faster someone categorizes his or her job (measured in milliseconds) as negative compared to positive, the more negative the implicit attitude is (i.e., because a faster categorization implies that the two concepts—“work” and “negative”—are closely related in one’s mind). Laurie Rudman Delayed reactions Implicit associations test (IAT) researcher Laurie Rudman uses an example I think a lot of us can relate to. We love our pets, but some of us are more dog people or cat people. Me, I’m a dog person. Delayed reactions Now in that case you could just ask me, and I don’t hate cats; I just like dogs more. But what if I did hate cats and you asked me to pair two classes of objects (e.g. dogs and cats) with both good and bad words (e.g. vacation vs. poison). An automatic preference for dogs is shown to the extent that dog/vacation is faster than cat/vacation. Hold it, does a quarter second delay really mean anything? Predicts Behaviour Yes, oddly enough the IAT predicted behaviors better than self-reports did when the domain concerned prejudice and stereotypes: things we don’t want to explicitly endorse. Umm… Just because it is a cute picture Although it seems sometimes you can just ask What do you think of this study? What do you think of this Rudman study? You give American introductory psychology students a list of names. Some names are typically white (John) some typically black (Lamar) and a list of words some positive (sunshine) some negative (filth) some stereotypically positive (ambitious) and some stereotypically negative (lazy). That is the IAT task. After this task you ask them explicitly about their bias ( a scale of 1-10 how warm do you feel towards African- Americans, Whites) and then a short prejudice questionnaire (with items like “Blacks are getting too pushy”) and ask them about their verbal and physical aggression towards Blacks. Guess what their IAT predicts their aggressive behaviour The attitude IAT (e.g., White-sunshine, Black-poison) covaried with verbal discrimination (e.g. ethnic slurs and jokes),whereas the stereotype IAT (e.g., White-ambitious and Black-lazy) was related to each behavioral index (verbal, defensive, and offensive). And here is a bit of the controversy To prove the validity of implicit measures we often have to correlate them with explicit measures. And when we do … we find people can be quite open about their sexism and racism. The IAT came out in 1995 and it quickly became the gold standard for measuring implicit attitudes. I have to say it took me a few years to warm up to it. By that time, I had grown up on the prairies and done some graduate work in Georgia, places where people were pretty open about at least their racial struggles. It was actually thanks to people like Rudman who had a nice study that correlated IAT scores and biases in one’s willingness to cut funding of certain student groups that convinced me there is value to the IAT, that is I became convinced that it was measuring biases that we were not openly endorsing. All of this brings us to Susan Fiske’s article on Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotyping Susan T. Fiske: Social psychologist who has written on stereotyping, sexism, and power and control Blatant and implicit bias It is probably good to read Fiske’s article, as she may have a better sense than me that most bias is implicit. She states that in the past, people used to be more explicit with their biases, but during the 20th century, when it became less socially acceptable to exhibit bias, such things like prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination became more subtle (automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent).” But, there are at least two personality orientations that can be quite open about their biases: those with a social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarians. Social dominance orientation: some people are just better than others Social dominance orientation (SDO): equality is a myth a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and are even a good idea to maintain order and stability. “Those who score high on SDO believe that some groups are inherently better than others, and because of this, there is no such thing as group ’equality.’ At the same time, though, SDO is not just about being personally dominant and controlling of others; SDO describes a preferred arrangement of groups with some on top (preferably one’s own group) and some on the bottom” (Textbook p.729). Who is high in SDO? Politically conservative, low empathy, strong work ethic. Research has shown that people higher in SDO are more likely to be politically conservative, and usually lower than average on tolerance, empathy, altruism, and community orientation. In general, those high in SDO have a strong belief in work ethic—that hard work always pays off and leisure is a waste of time. Social Dominance orientation affects our career choices and successes. People higher on SDO tend to choose and thrive in occupations that maintain existing group hierarchies (police, prosecutors, business), compared to those lower in SDO, who tend to pick more equalizing occupations (social work, public defense, psychology). Dominant groups tend to score higher on SDO “…. a preference for inequality as normal and natural—also predicts endorsing the superiority of certain groups: men, native-born residents, heterosexuals, and believers in the dominant religion. This means seeing women, minorities, homosexuals, and non-believers as inferior. Understandably, the first list of groups tend to score higher on SDO, while the second group tends to score lower. (Textbook, p. 729). Right-wing authoritarianism: I have to protect my values Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts, whereas SDO focuses on the economic ones. That is, RWA endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity (Altemeyer, 1988). RWA respects group unity over individual preferences, wanting to maintain group values in the face of differing opinions. I hate this name, because as your textbook states, “Despite its name, though, RWA is not necessarily limited to people on the right (conservatives)” (textbook, p.730). RWA predict in-group loyalty? Extreme scores on RWA predict biases against outgroups while demanding in-group loyalty and conformity. Can you be both SDO (some people are just better than others) and RWA (those out groups have bad values)? Yes. The combination of high RWA and high SDO predicts joining hate groups that openly endorse aggression against minority groups, immigrants, homosexuals, and believers in non-dominant religions (Altemeyer, 2004). Conformity and obedience Conformity and obedience Tendency to act and think like the people around us is conformity. Submission to authority is obedience. Conformity: Why do we do it? Normative influence. We are worried what people will think. Solomon Asch (1907-1996) Asch, 1953 Asch Paradigm Just 11 miles south of Philadelphia is a private liberal arts college called Swarthmore College. In the 1950’s a professor at Swarthmore did a series of “vision” studies. But he wasn’t studying vision at all. Conformity experiment Asch Paradigm Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that only 25% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 75% conformed at least once, and 5% conformed every time (37% conformity over subjects averaged across the critical trials). Does anything help us resist conformity? Yes. Asch himself was very interested in this question, and he found the unanimity of the confederates was the answer. Even if only one confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more likely to resist the urge to conform (only 5-10% conform) than when the confederates all agree. Replications: More conformity in adolescents, people in collectivist cultures, and when more people are around. Variations of Asch’s procedures have been conducted numerous times (Bond, 2005; Bond & Smith, 1996). There is an increase in conformity with more confederates (up to about five), that teenagers are more prone to conforming than are adults, and that people conform significantly less often when they believe the confederates will not hear their responses Finally, although we see the effect in virtually every culture that has been studied, more conformity is found in collectivist countries such as Japan and China than in individualistic countries such as the United States (Bond & Smith, 1996). Compared with individualistic cultures, people who live in collectivist cultures place a higher value on the goals of the group than on individual preferences. They also are more motivated to maintain harmony in their interpersonal relations. Informational influence The other reason we sometimes go along with the crowd is that people are often a source of information. Psychologists refer to this process as informational influence. Most of us, most of the time, are motivated to do the right thing. But sometimes it’s not clear what society expects of us. In these situations, we often act like those of people around us act. Informational influence (and getting drunk, an example from your textbook) “There are many reasons why students binge drink, but one of the most important is their perception of the descriptive norm. How much students drink is highly correlated with how much they believe the average student drinks (Neighbors, Lee, Lewis, Fossos, & Larimer, 2007). Unfortunately, students aren’t very good at making this assessment. They notice the boisterous heavy drinker at the party but fail to consider all the students not attending the party. As a result, students typically overestimate the descriptive norm for college student drinking (Borsari & Carey, 2003; Perkins, Haines, & Rice, 2005). Most students believe they consume significantly less alcohol than the norm, a miscalculation that creates a dangerous push toward more and more excessive alcohol consumption. On the positive side, providing students with accurate information about drinking norms has been found to reduce overindulgent drinking (Burger, LaSalvia, Hendricks, Mehdipour, & Neudeck, 2011; Neighbors, Lee, Lewis, Fossos, & Walter, 2009)” (Textbook, p. 717). More positive Informational influence Homeowners reduced the amountof energy they used when they learned that they were consuming more energy than their neighbor. Undergraduates selected the healthy food option when led to believe that other students had made this choice. Hotel guests were more likely to reuse their towels when a hanger in the bathroom told them that this is what most guests did. More people began using the stairs instead of the elevator when informed that the vast majority of people took the stairs to go up one or two floors. Obedience Obedience involves following authority Researchers who study obedience are interested in how people react when given an order or command from someone in a position of authority. Milgram conducted probably the most important obedience studies of all time. Milgram (1963, 1965, 1974) wanted to know why so many otherwise decent German citizens went along with the brutality of the Nazi leaders during the Holocaust. “These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person,” Milgram (1963,p. 371) wrote, “but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders”. At 150 volts “Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse togo on. Let me out.” If the participant didn’t want to keep giving the shocks or was hesitant. The experimenter would say “The experiment requires that you continue,” and “You have no other choice, you must go on.” The experimenter ended the session only after the participant stated four successive times that he did not want to continue. All the while, the learner’s protests became more intense with each shock. After 300 volts, the learner refused to answer any more questions, which led the experimenter to say that no answer should be considered a wrong answer. After 330 volts, despite vehement protests from the learner following previous shocks, the teacher heard only silence, suggesting that the learner was now physically unable to respond 65% of participants were obedient! 65 percent of the participants continued to administer shocks to the very end of the session. Milgram found obedience rates decreased when the learner was in the same room as the experimenter and declined even further when the teacher had to physically touch the learner to administer the punishment. Participants also were less willing to continue the procedure after seeing other teachers refuse to press the shock levers, and they were significantly less obedient when the instructions to continue came from a person they believed to be another participant rather than from the experimenter. Milgram found women and men equally obedient “…women participants followed the experimenter’s instructions at exactly the same rate the men had” (Textbook, p.719). Helping and Prosocial Behavior helping—prosocial acts in dyadic situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need. Three things seem to determine when bystanders help others To answer the question regarding when people help, researchers have focused on 1. how bystanders come to define emergencies, 2. when they decide to take responsibility for helping, and 3. how the costs and benefits of intervening affect their decisions of whether to help. Is this an emergency? Pluralistic ignorance 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. When people use the inactions of others to define their own course of action, the resulting pluralistic ignorance leads to less help being given. Do I have to be the one to help?: Diffusion of responsibility The costs and rewards of helping If the needed help is of relatively low cost in terms of time, money, resources, or risk, then help is more likely to be given. Lending a classmate a pencil is easy; confronting the knife-wielding assailant who attacked Kitty Genovese is an entirely different matter. As the unfortunate case of Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax demonstrates (who tried to separate a couple fighting and got stabbed for his efforts), intervening may cost the life of the helper. But hold it, beyond those three things (it’s an emergency, it’s my job, and it is low cost) aren’t some people just more likely to help than others? Yes. Some people are more agreeable, empathetic, and helpful. Remember the five factor model: people high in agreeableness tend to be more helpful. Louis Penner: prosocial personality orientation (not surprisingly it consists of empathy and believe being helpful can do some good) Prosocial personality orientation Rather than focus on a single trait Penner and colleagues have taken a broader perspective and identified a prosocial personality orientation. Their research indicates that two major characteristics are related to the prosocial personality and prosocial behavior: other-oriented empathy and helpfulness. People high on other oriented empathy have a strong sense of social responsibility, empathize with and feel emotionally tied to those in need, understand the problems the victim is experiencing, and have a heightened sense of moral obligation to be helpful. This factor has been shown to be highly correlated with the trait of agreeableness discussed previously. Those high on the helpfulness factor have been helpful in the past, and because they believe they can be effective with the help they give, they are more likely to be helpful in the future. OK, so we have environmental factors (is anyone else helping? is it my job?) personality factors (like agreeableness), is there anything else that affects helping? Well let’s break down this whole empathy thing. Am I helping because it makes me feel better? The other person feel better? A bit of both? Motivational factors Psychologists have suggested that 1) evolutionary forces may serve to predispose humans to help others, 2) egoistic concerns may determine if and when help will be given, and 3) selfless, altruistic motives may also promote helping in some cases. Evolutionary forces: kin selection (and to a lesser extent) reciprocal altruism Kin selection: helping (at least those similar to us) is in our DNA? “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” J. B. S. Haldane , rb > c Kin Selection “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)” (Textbook, p. 740). There is some observational data to suggest kin selection is true, and surveys indicate what you might think: I am more likely to help someone without considering reciprocity if it is a relative. That brings us to the next topic. Reciprocal altruism “But, we do not restrict our relationships just to our own family members. We live in groups that include individuals who are unrelated to us, and we often help them too. Why? Reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971) provides the answer. 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. Evolutionary forces may provide a general inclination for being helpful, but they may not be as good an explanation for why we help in the here and now. What factors serve as proximal influences for decisions to help?” (Textbook, p. 742) Proximal reasons for helping There are egotistic (it makes me feel better) and altruistic (it makes the other person feel better) reasons for helping Egoistic reasons for helping: negative state relief Most people would like to think that they help others because they are concerned about the other person’s plight. In truth, the reasons why we help may be more about ourselves than others: Egoistic or selfish motivations may make us help. Implicitly, we may ask, “What’s in it for me?” There are two major theories that explain what types of reinforcement helpers may be seeking. The negative state relief model (e.g., Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973; Cialdini, Kenrick, & Baumann, 1982) suggests that people sometimes help in order to make themselves feel better. Whenever we are feeling sad, we can use helping someone else as a positive mood boost to feel happier. Through socialization, we have learned that helping can serve as a secondary reinforcement that will relieve negative moods (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). (Textbook, p. 742) arousal: cost–reward model “This model focuses on the aversive feelings aroused by seeing another in need. If you have ever heard an injured puppy yelping in pain, you know that feeling, and you know that the best way to relieve that feeling is to help and to comfort the puppy” (Textbook, p. 742)(Notice how close this is to altruism in that both altruism and arousal:cost-reward depend on the actor having empathy.) Altruism: no really, I’m concerned about the other person empathy–altruism model “Batson (2011) has offered the empathy–altruism model to explain altruistically motivated helping for which the helper expects no benefits. According to this model, the key for altruism is empathizing with the victim, that is, putting oneself in the shoes of the victim and imagining how the victim must feel. When taking this perspective and having empathic concern, potential helpers become primarily interested in increasing the well-being of the victim, even if the helper must incur some costs that might otherwise be easily avoided” (Textbook, p. 743). So, how does this differ from arousal: costreward? Your textbook explains, Because egoistically motivated individuals are primarily concerned with their own cost–benefit outcomes, they are less likely to help if they think they can escape the situation with no costs to themselves. In contrast, altruistically motivated helpers are willing to accept the cost of helping to benefit a person with whom they have empathized—this “self-sacrificial” approach to helping is the hallmark of altruism (Batson, 2011)” (Textbook p. 743).