PSY 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Murder Of Kitty Genovese, Reinforcement, Prosocial Behavior

• School: University of Miami
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 210
• Professor: Rod Gillis

Document Summary

Prosocial behavior: theoretical explanations for prosocial behavior, responding to an emergency. Will bystanders help: external and internal factors that influence helping, the effects of being helped. Theoretical explanations for prosocial behavior: empathy-altruism hypothesis. Pure desire to help: negative state relief model. Selfish desire to make self feel better: empathic joy hypothesis. Motivated by the positive feeling one gets: competitive altruism. Help in order to gain status: genetic determinism model. Help others who are genetically similar to ourselves to preserve our gene pool this is a sociobiological explanation. Empathy altruism hypothesis: empathy is the capacity to experience others emotional states vicariously. Three components of empathy (gleason et al. 2009: emotional empathy: sharing feelings, empathic accuracy: correctly perceiving others thoughts this component leads to good social relations, empathic concern: concern for well-being of others. Why is empathy declining among us college students? (konrath et al. 2011: increasing exposure to violence in mass media, schools still emphasizing unearned self-esteem.