Helping behavior theories

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Developmental psychology; motivation; personality; social psychology
• Theories of helping behavior have attempted to explain why people offer physical and psychological assistance to others in both emergency and nonemergency situations. These theories have considered the roles of physiological arousal, judgments of costs and rewards, mood states, and attributions of responsibility in influencing helping behavior.

Introduction

Helping involves assisting another person or animal in need. Helping behaviors can take various forms. Some, such as carrying a book for a friend, require little effort. Others, such as jumping into a lake to rescue a drowning stranger, are life-threatening. To explain helping behavior, researchers have studied many variables and developed theories to organize them and account for their interrelationships.

Arousal Cost-Reward Model

In 1981, Jane Allyn Piliavin, John Dovidio, Samuel Gaertner, and Russell Clark introduced the arousal cost-reward model. This model assumes that witnessing the need or distress of another person is physiologically arousing. When one attributes the source of one’s arousal to another person’s distress, the arousal is sometimes experienced as emotionally unpleasant, and one becomes motivated to reduce it.

According to the arousal cost-reward model, a person will choose to engage in the arousal-decreasing response associated with the fewest net costs. Net costs are based on two types of rewards and costs associated with the helping situation: costs for not helping and rewards and costs for helping. Costs for not helping occur when no assistance is given and may include experiences such as feeling troubled because someone in need is continuing to suffer or receiving criticism from others for being callous. Costs for helping are direct negative outcomes that the potential helper might experience after offering help, such as loss of time, embarrassment, or injury. Helping, however, can also be associated with positive outcomes such as praise, gratitude, and feelings of self-worth.

Piliavin and her colleagues suggest that both types of costs influence the decision to help. When net costs are low, as the costs for not helping increase, helping in the form of direct intervention becomes more likely. If net costs for helping are high, however, direct intervention is unlikely, regardless of the potential costs for not helping. In this latter situation, a person may give indirect assistance (for example, call someone else to help). Alternatively, the person may deny responsibility for helping, reinterpret the situation as one in which help is not needed, or try to leave the scene altogether.

Attributions of Responsibility

Philip Brickman, an expert in the psychology of happiness, and his colleagues argue that when one sees a person in need, one makes about how responsible that person is for the problem they face and also about how much responsibility that person should take for its solution. These attributions, in turn, influence one’s judgment about who one thinks is best suited to deliver help, and, if one decides to offer help oneself, they influence its form. One may be most likely to offer direct assistance if one attributes little responsibility to that person for solving the problem—as when a child is lost in a shopping mall. In contrast, if one judges a person as responsible for solving their problem, as when a friend has a nasty boss, one may offer encouragement and moral support but not directly intervene. Thus, who one thinks should provide the remedy—oneself, experts, or the person who needs the help—depends on attributions that one makes about responsibility.

Similarly, the bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon explaining that people are less likely to engage in helping behaviors when others are present, projecting the responsibility of intervening onto those around them. This concept was proposed in 1964 after twenty-nine-year-old Kitty Genovese was murdered in an attack witnessed by nearly forty people, though this number was later said to be exaggerated. Conversely, individuals who witness another person in need are more likely to engage in helping behavior if the person in need has helped the individual in the past. This phenomenon is called the reciprocity norm.

Mood

One’s mood may also influence one’s decision to help someone in need. In general, people experiencing a positive mood, such as happiness, are more likely to offer help than are those in neutral moods. Using quantitative procedures for summarizing the results of thirty-four experimental studies, Michael Carlson, Ventura Charlin, and Norman Miller concluded that the best general explanation for why positive moods increase helpfulness is that they heighten sensitivity to positive reinforcement or good outcomes. This sensitivity includes both thinking more about good outcomes for oneself and increased thought about the goodness of behaving prosocially. This general summary incorporates many explanations that have been proposed for the relation between positive moods and helping, among them the mood maintenance and social outlook explanations.

Mood maintenance argues that one behaves more helpfully when happy because doing so prolongs one’s good mood. The social outlook explanation points instead to the fact that positive moods are often the consequences of another person’s behavior (for example, being given a compliment). Such actions by others trigger thoughts about human kindness, cooperativeness, and goodness. These thoughts, if still present when someone asks for help, make a person more likely to respond positively.

The effects of bad moods on helpfulness are more complex. Carlson and Miller also quantitatively summarized the effects found in forty-four studies concerned with the impact of various mood-lowering events on helpfulness. These studies included such diverse procedures for inducing negative moods as having subjects repeat depressing phrases, view unpleasant slides, imagine sad experiences, and fail at a task. Two factors can apparently account for most of the findings on negative moods and helping. The first is whether the target of the mood-lowering event is the self or someone else; the second is whether the self or an outside force is responsible for the mood-lowering event. When one is responsible for imposing a mood-lowering event on another person and, therefore, feels guilty, helping is very likely. When one is responsible for an event that lowers one’s own mood (as when one engages in self-harm) or when one witnesses another person impose a mood-lowering event on someone else (that is, when one experiences empathy), a positive response to a subsequent request for help is more likely, but not as much as in the first case. In contrast, when someone else is responsible for one’s own negative mood—when one has been victimized—one’s helpfulness tends to be inhibited.

Theoretical Explanations

These explanations can be applied to a wide range of helping situations: reactions to both physical and psychological distress, situations in which helping appears to be determined by a rational consideration of costs and rewards, and situations in which the help offered seemingly is irrational and very costly.

One study on which the arousal cost-reward model was based suggests how consideration of costs and rewards might affect the decision to offer direct physical assistance. In this study, a man feigned collapse on the floor of a New York subway a few minutes after boarding the train and remained there until help was given. In some cases, the man smelled of alcohol and carried an alcohol bottle wrapped in a paper bag, giving the impression that drunkenness had caused his fall. In other instances, the man carried a cane, suggesting that he had fallen because of a physical impairment. Although many people offered assistance in both conditions, more people helped the man with the cane than the man who appeared to be drunk.

The different amounts of assistance in the two conditions may result from differences in perceived net costs. Potential helpers may have expected greater costs when the man looked drunk than when he appeared to be disabled. Helping a drunk may require more effort, invite more risk, and be more unpleasant than helping someone with a physical impairment. It may also be less intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding than helping someone with a physical impairment. Finally, costs for not helping may be lower in the case of the drunk than for the man with the cane. The drunk may be perceived as "only drunk" and, therefore, not really needy. Thus, the finding that more people helped the man with the cane is consistent with the hypothesis that helping increases as the net costs associated with the helping response decrease.

Although considerations of costs and rewards are important, it would be unrealistic to think that helping only occurs when net costs are low. People may engage in very costly helping behaviors when physiological arousal is especially high, such as in clear, unambiguous emergencies. The actions of an unknown passenger aboard an airplane that crashed into a frozen river illustrate this point. As rescuers in a helicopter attempted to pull people out of the water to safety, this passenger repeatedly handed the lowered life ring to other, more seriously injured passengers, even though these acts of heroism eventually cost him his life.

Much research on helpfulness has asked, "When do people help?" It is also important, however, to look at what type of help is given and how the person in need is expected to react to offers of assistance. The Brickman model, involving attributions of responsibility for the problem and its solution, does this. It also looks at more everyday forms of helping. According to Brickman, if one attributes responsibility for both the problem and its solution to the person in need, one is applying the moral model of helping. With this orientation, one may have the tendency to view the person in need as lazy and undeserving of help. In the subway example, people may not have helped the fallen drunk because they made such attributions. Although people who apply the moral model may not give direct assistance, they may sometimes support and encourage the person’s own effort to overcome the problem.

If one sees people as responsible for their problem but not for its solution, then one is applying the enlightenment model. Criminals are held responsible for violating the law but are jailed because they are judged incapable of reforming themselves, and jail is believed to be rehabilitating as well as punishing. Discipline from those in authority is seen as the appropriate helping response, and submission to it is expected from the person receiving the "assistance."

The medical model applies when the person is seen as responsible for neither the problem nor its solution. This orientation is often taken toward the ill. Such situations call for an expert whose recommendations are to be accepted and fulfilled.

In the final combination of attributions of responsibility for a problem and its solution, the compensatory model, the person is not held responsible for having caused the problem. The problem may be judged to be caused by factors beyond the person’s control, such as when an earthquake occurs. In this model, however, the person is held responsible for solving the problem. Helpers may provide useful resources but are not expected to take the initiative for a solution. In the case of an earthquake, the government may offer low-interest loans for rebuilding, but victims must decide whether to apply for one and rebuild their homes.

Historical Background

Concern with helping behavior has its roots in early philosophy. Thinkers such as Aristotle, Socrates, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes debated whether humans are by nature good or bad, selfish or selfless. Most empirical psychological research on the topic, however, was only initiated after the 1950s. This was probably not coincidental. Many people were concerned with the atrocities of World War II, and many in the United States were concerned with rising crime rates. In response, psychologists not only began to investigate human cruelty but also gave increased attention to what could be done to offset it. Similarly, the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, with its emphasis on cooperation and harmony, probably further propelled the study of prosocial behavior. The term "prosocial behavior," or behavior intended to benefit other people, is sometimes used synonymously with "helping" and is sometimes meant to be a larger category that includes helping.

Early studies of helping behavior examined situational variables that influence the decision to help someone who is in physical distress. The arousal cost-reward model and the subway experiment characterize this type of work. Also important during this period were Alvin Gouldner’s theorizing on the norm of reciprocity and subsequent empirical investigation of the social norms governing helping behavior, such as Leonard Berkowitz’s work in the 1960s. As social psychologists explored situational variables that influence helping, developmental psychologists examined the emergence of positive social behavior in children. Some, such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, postulated distinct stages of moral development. Others focused on how people who model helping behavior influence children’s subsequent behavior.

Extensions of the Earlier Research

While research continues in all these areas, other questions also attract interest. Studies of people’s responses to others’ physical distress have been extended by research on how people respond to someone in psychological distress. Similarly, researchers have extended their interests in the potential helper to examine how the person in need of help is affected by seeking and receiving it.

Also important in understanding helping behavior has been the study of personality and how individuals differ in their tendency to help. Some of this work is related to research on norms, in that it looks at whether people develop a personal set of rules or standards that govern their helping behavior. Another approach, adopted by Margaret Clark and Judson Mills, has looked at how the relationship between the help requester and the help giver influences helpfulness. Research on helping now incorporates many different influences on the helping process, from individual to social to developmental factors. In the process, the applicability of the research findings has grown and has given rise to a broader understanding of the types of helping behavior that may occur, when they may occur, who might engage in them, and why.

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