PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR (CONTINUE………):Bystander Intervention, Diffusion of responsibility

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Lesson 38

PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR (CONTINUE.........)

Aims

To introduce psychological aspects of prosocial behaviour

Objectives

Discuss different explanations of helping behavior: Why do we help?

Evaluate the Bystander Intervention Model

Discuss two psychological processes that can prevent helping

Describe Emotional arousal & Cost-Reward Assessments in the process of

prosocial behavior

Describe the individual variables affecting prosocial behavior: Who helps?

Bystander Intervention

Two psychological processes can prevent helping at different stages

· The audience inhibition effect (stage 1)

· Diffusion of responsibility (stage 2)

The audience inhibition effect

People are inhibited from helping for fear of negative evaluation by others if they intervene and the

situation is not an emergency

Latane & Darley (1968)

· Recruited male college students for a study on problems of urban life

· Hypothesized that when others are present, people are less likely to perceive a potentially

dangerous situation as an emergency, especially when others seem unconcerned.

· Participants sitting in a room completing a questionnaire

· Three experimental conditions: participant alone, with 3 other participants or with 2 unconcerned

confederates

· White smoke starts entering the room through a small air vent

· After 6 minutes too thick to see through!

· What would the participant do

Alone

in different situations?

Audience inhibition

3 naive

The results are illustrated in Figure 1:

participants

2 passive

The graph above shows that when alone

confederates

75% of the time the participant finally

left the room to report the emergency.

However, when the participant was

others in only 38% of the trials, did a

single person report the incident before

the six-minute mark. As opposed to

these two conditions, when others were

calm more audience inhibition effect

Time from smoke infusion (minutes)

occurred. The researchers concluded

that when others are present, people:

· not only are less likely to define

a potentially dangerous situation as emergency

· respond more slowly

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Another study was conducted to investigate the audience inhibition effect.

Latane & Rodin (1969)

· Experimenter leaves participant in a room

· After several minutes a tape is played in which a crashing sound is heard and then the

experimenter's screaming...

· "Oh my God, my foot...I ..I..can't move...it..... Oh . my ankle...I...can't get this...thing...off me...."

· 70% helped when alone, only 7% helped with unconcerned confederates!

Explanations of audience inhibition

· Evidence comes from conformity research (experiments of Sherif and Asch).

· Information influence (looking to others to define uncertain situations): When we are not clear how

to define a particular situation, we are likely to become dependent on others for a definition of

social reality. Thus when a group of people witnesses a possible emergency, each person bases his

interpretation of the event partly or exclusively on the reaction of others. In "Smoke" and "Woman

in distress" studies, others' behavior significantly inhibited helping.

· Normative influence (fear of being negatively evaluated - `losing your cool'). People have learned

to maintain a calm "exterior" so that other people do not evaluate us negatively.

Postexperimental debriefing with the participants indicated that some participants who did not

intervene claimed that they were either unsure of what had occurred or did not think that the

situation was very serious.

Diffusion of responsibility

In some situations there is a clear emergency (not ambiguous and no fear of `getting it wrong'). When

others are present people believe they are less personally responsible.

Darley and Latane believed that this realization that others could also help diffused the neighbours' own

feelings of individual responsibility. They called this response to others' presence the diffusion of

responsibility--the belief that the presence of other people in a situation makes one less personally

responsible for events that occur in that situation.

Experiment of Darley & Latane (1968)

· In this study, participants (New York University students) thought that they were participating in a

discussion about the kinds of personal problems undergraduates typically face in a large urban

environment.

They were also told that to avoid embarrassment, they each would be placed in separate booths and

would talk to one another using an intercom system. The way the intercom system worked was that

only one person could speak at a time, and the others had to merely listen.

Experimenter said would not be listening in on intercom

The study included three different conditions. Some participants were told the discussion would be

with just one other student, while others were told they were either part of a three-person or a six-

person group.

Discussion began with the first speaker stating that he was an epileptic who was prone to seizures

when studying hard or when taking exams. When everyone else had spoken, the first speaker began

to talk again, but now he was speaking in a loud and increasingly incoherent voice.

All other discussants were tape recordings.

The percentage of helping decreased as the number of strangers present increased.

In many replications when alone 75% helped vs. 53% when with others.

People deny that the presence of others affected their inclination to help.

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

The experiment described above is illustrated in Figure 2:

Participant alone

Diffusion of responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility on the

Participant with a

Internet

stranger

120

· Diffusion of responsibility also

Participant with four

strangers

100

occurs when people need help

on the Internet

Markey (2000):

· More than 4,800 people were

monitored in 400 different

Internet chat groups over a

month's time to determine the

120

160

200

240

280

Seconds from beginning of fit

amount of time it took to render

assistance to someone who

asked for help.

· It took longer for people to receive help as the number of people present in a computer-mediated

chat group increased.

· However, this diffusion of responsibility was virtually eliminated and help was received more

quickly when help was asked for by specifying a bystander's name.

Emotional

arousal

Cost-Reward

Emotional Arousal and Cost-Reward Assessments

assessments Piliavin et al. (1981)

( Piliavin et al. (1981) )

Latane and Darley explain the social problem of

non-intervention; Piliavin describes why we

Cost for direct help

Low

High

decide to help in emergency. Jane Piliavin and

Cost for no help

her colleagues (1981) attempted to answer this

question by developing a theory of bystander

High

Direct

Indirect

intervention that extends and complements

intervention

Latane and Darley's model. These researchers

added to the decision-making equation by

Redefinition

focusing on bystanders' emotional arousal

of situation

during an emergency and their assessment of the

Low

Variable:

Leaving the

costs of helping and not helping. Essentially,

perceived

scene

their work focuses on the later part of Latane

norm

ignoring,

and Darley's model, namely, deciding on

denial

personal responsibility (step 2), deciding what to

do (step 3), and implementing action (step 4).

According to their arousal cost-reward model of helping, witnessing an emergency is emotionally

arousing and is generally experienced as an uncomfortable tension that we, as bystanders, seek to decrease.

This tension can be reduced in several different ways. We could intervene and thereby decrease our

arousal, but we could also reduce arousal by either ignoring danger signs or benignly interpreting them as

nothing to worry about.

What are the costs to the bystander for helping? This could involve a host of expenditures, including loss of

time, energy, resources, health (even life), as well as the risk of social disapproval and embarrassment if the

help is not needed or is ineffective. If both types of costs are low, intervention will depend on the perceived

social norms in the situation. The most difficult situation for bystanders is one in which the costs for

helping and for not helping are both high. Here, the arousal cost-reward model suggests two likely courses

of action:

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

1. One is for bystanders to intervene indirectly by calling the police, an ambulance, or some other

professional helping source.

2. Another course of action is for bystanders to redefine the situation in a way that results in them not

helping. Here, they could decide there really is no emergency after all, or that someone else will

help, or that the victim deserves to suffer.

This theory's consideration of these two cost factors cannot explain the behavior of heroes, but it does

explain the behavior of more ordinary bystanders in emergency situations. However, a number of studies

support the arousal cost-reward model's hypothesis that people often weigh the costs of helping and not

helping prior to rendering assistance.

Who Helps?

Positive and negative moods

· Alice Isen (1970) administered a series of tests to college students and teachers

· Three experimental and one control condition: In experimental conditions, participants were later

told that they had either performed very well or very poorly. The third group was told nothing at all

about their performance. In addition to these three experimental conditions, a control group was not

administered any tests at all.

The participants who had "succeeded" at the tests were later more likely to help a woman

struggling with an armful of books than any of the other participants.

This good mood effect following success has been replicated in other studies (Klein, 2003)

People in good mood are more likely to help due to following reasons:

· Perceive other people as "nice," "honest," and "decent," and thus deserving of our help.

· We help others to enhance or prolong our good mood.

· When happy, we are less likely to be absorbed in our own thoughts; thus, we are more attentive

to others' needs.

· A fourth possibility is that good moods increase the likelihood that we think about the

rewarding nature of social activities in general.

Other Research:

People are more likely to help others:

· on sunny days than on cloudy ones (Cunmngham, 1979)

· after finding money or being offered a tasty treat (Isen & Levin, 1972)

· after listening to uplifting music or seeing a comedy (North et al., 2004; Wilson, 1981).

Bad moods and seeking relief

· Isen and her coworkers (1973) found that people who believed they had failed at an experimental

task were more likely to help another person than those who did not experience failure.

· Although this response certainly seems to contradict the good mood effect just described, one

possible link between the two moods is the rewarding properties of helping.

· Negative moods sometimes lead to more helping because helping others often makes us feel good

about ourselves, when feeling bad we may help as a way of escaping our mood--just as we help

when we are in a good mood to maintain that mood.

Michael Cunningham and his colleagues (1980):

· Feeling guilty can also increase helping behavior. Michael Cunningham and his colleagues (1980)

conducted a field study in which individuals were approached on the street by a young man who

asked people to use his camera to take his picture for a class project.

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

The problem for the would-be helpers was that the camera had been rigged to malfunction. When

the helpers realized the camera was not working, the young man examined camera closely and

asked the helpers if they touched any of the dials.

He then informed them that it would have to be repaired. The researchers assumed that such an

encounter would induce a certain degree of guilt in these individuals.

These now guilty people passed a young woman who suddenly dropped a file folder containing

some papers.

How do you think they responded to this needy situation?

Only 40% of the passersby who had no broken camera experience paused to help; in comparison

80% of guilty helped.

Debate over the effect of negative mood on prosocial behavior

Although these studies demonstrate that negative moods can also lead to prosocial behavior, Robert

Cialdini and Douglas Kenrick (1976) attempted to explain why this is the case by proposing that when we

are in a bad mood, our decision to help is often based on a simple self-serving question: Will helping make

us feel better? For those in a bad mood, helping when we are in a bad mood, if the perceived benefits for

helping are high and the costs are low, the expected reward value for helping will be high, and thus, we will

likely help to lift our own spirits. However, if the perceived benefits and costs are reversed so that the

reward value is low, we are unlikely to help. Essentially, this model predicts that bad moods are more likely

to lead to helping than neutral moods when helping is easy and highly rewarding. Studies suggest that when

we experience extremely negative moods, such as grief or depression, we may be so focused on our own

emotional state that we simply don't notice others' needs and concerns (Carlson & Miller, 1987). Other

studies suggest that even when experiencing less severe negative moods, we are less likely to help than

those who are in good moods (Isen, 1984). The "negative state relief model" answers this debate by

asserting that perceived benefits for helping determine whether bad mood will lead to help or not (Cialdini

& Kenrick, 1976).

The varied effects of mood on helping:

Good mood

Greater attention

Desire to prolong

More

More likely to

to social

good mood

likely to

think about the

environment

perceive

rewarding nature

increases likelihood

people in a

of social activities

of noticing other's

needs

More helping

More

if help is

helping if

More helping

expected to

help is

maintain

expected to

mood

bring

rewards

Less helping if

help is

Less helping if

expected to

help is not

destroy mood

expected to bring

rewards

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Bad mood

Self focused attention reduces

Desire to improve

likelihood of noticing other's

mood

needs

More helping unless costs

Less helping

are believed to out weigh

rewards

Less helping if mood is

elevated by some other

sources

Reading

· Franzoi, S. (2003). Social Psychology. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Chapter 14.

Other Readings

· Lord, C.G. (1997). Social Psychology. Orlando: Harcourt Brace and Company. Chapter 8.

· David G. Myers, D. G. (2002). Social Psychology (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

· Taylor, S.E. (2006). Social Psychology (12th ed.). New York: Prentice Hall.

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