PSY 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Prosocial Behavior, Terror Management Theory, Pluralistic Ignorance
Chapter 13 Notes
● Prosocial behavior - action by an individual that is intended to benefit another individual
or set of individual
● Most of this work studies the factors that influence whether ordinary people choose to
help or not help each other from day to day
● Helping can come at a personal cost/physical risk, can also benefit the person giving the
help - theorists have often posited self-serving/egoistic motivations for helping,
motivated at least in oart by some degree of self-interest
● Helping others can make people feel good about themselves and their value in the larger
scheme of things; can serve more circumscribed goals, such as making the helper better
liked or socially accepted in a group
● Also genuinely care about those with whom we form emotional attachments
● Dan Batson - helping is often the result of a desire to help another person purely for the
other person’s benefit, regardless of whether there is any benefit to the self; when we feel
empathy for another person, we help not to serve our own needs but rather to serve the
needs of the other
● Altruism - the desire to help another purely for the other person’s benefit, regardless of
whether we derive any benefit
● A propensity for helping close relatives/kin might have been selected for over the course
of hominid evolution through kin selection - the idea that natural selection led to greater
tendencies to help close kin than to help those with whom we have little genetic
relationship; when the individual helps close kin, those shared genes are more likely to be
passed on to offspring
● The role of kin selected in human prosocial behavior is difficult to isolate empirically -
cultures teach people that they are obligated to help close relatives, so we don’t know
how much of the preference for helping close kin is innate and how much is culturally
learned; many examples of human helping cannot be explained by kin selection
● Evolutionary theory can help to explain altruism even if culture plays a role in shaping
when and toward whom we act altruistically - the general proclivity to be helpful;
inherited propensity can lead to behaviors that sometimes prevent the transmission of an
individual’s genes but that, on average, across people and situations, may have adaptive
value
● Emotions such as sympathy, empathy, compassion, and guilt are the bases for the human
propensity to engage in prosocial behavior
● The human propensity for cooperation offers another explanation of why helping is such
a prominent aspect of human behavior - cooperating with others for a common goal
means placing a certain amount of trust in someone else
● Norm of reciprocity - the explanation for why we give help: If I help you today, you
might be more likely to help me tomorrow
● We automatically feel obligated to return favors even to people we don’t know or don’t
like
● Reciprocity has its limits and cannot explain all prosocial behavior - the impulse to
reciprocate is strongest right away and can fade over time, generous to others when the
likelihood that they will reciprocate is low
● Studies have found evidence of the heritability of prosocial tendencies
● Other evidence suggestive of a biological basis for helpfulness can be found in the study
of nonhuman social animals
● Babies have a pretty keen sense of who’s naughty and who’s nice and infants as young as
three months prefer others who are helpful rather than hurtful; young kids help those who
have been helpful in the past
● Humans are also predisposed to learn helpful behaviors from others; positive parenting
practices predict greater prosocial behavior
● People’s prosocial behavior is jointly influenced by genes and the environment
● A learning-theory account of prosocial development suggests that people learn to be
helpful in a series of three stages
○ At a young age, children learn to be helpful to get things they want
○ Later in development, people learn to help because social rewards come from the
approval they receive from others
○ People help because they adhere to internalized values - they are listening to the
voice of their moral conscience rather than pursuing material goodies or approval
from others
● People’s propensity for prosocial behavior comes online early in development, but these
learning stages shape how this propensity is expressed and reinforced
● Learning to be helpful comes from a variety of cultural sources
● In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law the National Community Service Trust
Act, a program that provides students the opportunity to receive academic credit, money
toward college tuition, and/or job training for the time they spend volunteering with
community agencies
Document Summary
Prosocial behavior - action by an individual that is intended to benefit another individual. Most of this work studies the factors that influence whether ordinary people choose to help or not help each other from day to day. Helping can come at a personal cost/physical risk, can also benefit the person giving the help - theorists have often posited self-serving/egoistic motivations for helping, motivated at least in oart by some degree of self-interest. Helping others can make people feel good about themselves and their value in the larger scheme of things; can serve more circumscribed goals, such as making the helper better liked or socially accepted in a group. Also genuinely care about those with whom we form emotional attachments. Altruism - the desire to help another purely for the other person"s benefit, regardless of whether we derive any benefit. Emotions such as sympathy, empathy, compassion, and guilt are the bases for the human propensity to engage in prosocial behavior.
