Empathy, Social Psychology, and Global Helping Traits - Essay Example

Altruism is a motive to increase another's welfare without conscious regard for one's self-interests and is a behavior that benefits others at a personal cost to the behaving individual (Kerr, Godfrey-Smith, & Feldman 2004; Myers 2008). A classic example of altruism that most of us are familiar with is the behavior that the Good Samaritan exemplified in one of the famous parables. To be able to understand altruism or helping acts, it is very important to know why people help. There are three main perspectives that will explain helping behavior. These are the social-exchange theory, social norms theory, and evolutionary theory. First, let's consider the social-exchange theory. According to the social-exchange theory, our interactions are guided by a social economics in which we use a MINIMAX strategy, which is minimizing the costs and maximizing the rewards (Myers 2008). In other words, the benefits that we could get from helping other people must outweigh the costs of helping. The rewards or benefits of helping may either be external or internal. Helping to improve one's image to the public or helping to receive appreciation, approval or friendship can be considered as external rewards while helping to increase sense of self-worth can be an internal reward (Myers 2008). In relation to internal rewards, internal factors such as the helper's emotional state or personal traits are also deemed important (Myers 2008). Distress and guilt are examples of negative emotions that will move us to act in ways to reduce or avoid feeling either distressed or guilty (Myers 2008). For instance, we see a person on the streets badly needing help; to avoid any guilt-feeling afterwards, we will give aid to that person. In line with reducing private guilt, there is a phenomenon called as the FEEL BAD-DO GOOD phenomenon in which people are eager to do good after doing bad (Myers 2008). For instance, you told a little lie to your friend, afterwards he/she asks for your help in his/her assignment; most likely you will help this friend of yours because you felt bad after telling a little lie. From this phenomenon, it was concluded that when a person is in a guilty, a sad, or in any other negative mood, the negative mood can be reduced by a helpful act (Myers 2008). However, being in a negative mood does not always result in the FEEL BAD-DO GOOD phenomenon; anger and profound grief are just some of the exceptions (Myers 2008). If there is a FEEL BAD-DO GOOD phenomenon, there is a also a FEEL GOOD-DO GOOD effect, in which findings show that happy people are also helpful people (Myers 2008). Next on the list of the theories of helping is the social norms theory. Social norms are customary rules of behavior that tell us what we ought to do in order to coordinate our interactions and relations with other people (Durlauf & Blume 2007; Myers 2008). Two social norms that are involved in altruism are the reciprocity norm and the social responsibility norm (Myers 2008). The reciprocity norm says that, to those who help us, we should return help, not harm (Gouldner 1960 cited in Myers 2008). Admit it or not, we do practice the reciprocity norm in our everyday interactions with people around us like when we are with our friends. Not all people however have the ability to reciprocate help therefore the social-responsibility norm, which is the belief that people will help those who need help, without thinking about future exchanges, is the one at work (Berkowitz 1972 & Schwartz 1975 cited in Myers 2008). However, the application of the social-responsibility norm seems to be limited since most people will help other people only if they know that the one who needs help really deserves [need appears not to be due to one's own negligence] help (Myers 2008). In line with this, women may receive more offers for help than men because women are perceived as less competent and more dependent, signs that they "deserve" more help (Myers 2008). The third and final theory of helping is the evolutionary theory. There are two types of helping according to evolutionary psychology. These two are kin protection and reciprocity (Myers 2008). According to the evolutionary theory of helping, in order to enhance the survival of mutually shared genes, we help our close relatives like parents do for their children and vice-versa (Myers 2008). Kin selection, however, cannot explain helping acts done for individuals who are not part of the genetic kin (McAndrew 2002). Reciprocity or reciprocal altruism can help explain those acts; reciprocal altruism driven by genetic self-interest, is defined as cooperative behavior among unrelated individuals that benefits everyone involved (McAndrew 2002; Myers 2008). One similarity among the three theories of helping is that each shows two types of helping, a reciprocal exchange -- externally rewarded helping and a more unconditional helpfulness -- intrinsic helping (Myers 2008). A weakness of all the three theories is that they are using speculative, after-the-fact or hindsight reasoning, which will make them hard to disprove; however, being able to provide a coherent scheme for summarizing observations of helping is definitely their strength (Myers 2008). TABLE 1 Comparing Theories of Altruism (Myers 2008, p. 439) Theory Level of Explanation Externally Rewarded Helping Intrinsic Helping Social-exchange Psychological External rewards for helping Distress Inner rewards for helping Social norms Sociological Reciprocity norm Social responsibility norm Evolutionary Biological Reciprocity Kin selection In addition to all the theories of helping mentioned above, there is such thing as empathy-based altruism wherein empathy is the primary motive for helping other people (Myers 2008). Let us first differentiate empathy from sympathy. Sympathy is an emotion which involves some form of care or concern for another person while empathy is to put oneself in another's shoes and to think about the world "with" the person, rather than being directly concerned "about" the person (Miller n.d.; Myers 2008). There are also controversies when it comes to genuine, empathy-based altruism because some researchers doubt if it does exist. Furthermore, Robert Cialdini (1991 cited in Myers 2008) mentioned that egoistic explanations for altruism cannot be ruled out in experiments which involve altruism. However, other findings say that genuine altruism does exist wherein people, with their empathy aroused, will help even if their aid will not be made known to other people or even if their own mood will be unaffected (Myers 2008). References Durlauf, S. N. & Blume, L. E., 2007. Social norms, [Online]. Available at: http://www.econ.jhu.edu/People/Young/PalgraveSocialNormsJuly07JHU.pdf [accessed April 7, 2009]. Kerr, B., Godfrey-Smith, P., & Feldman, M. W., 2004. What is altruism Trends in ecology and evolution, [Online] 19 (3), pp. 135-140. Available at: http://beaker.biology.washington.edu/research/pubs/2004/Kerr_et_al2004.pdf [accessed April 7, 2009]. McAndrew, F. T., 2002. New evolutionary perspectives on altruism: Multilevel-selection and costly-signaling theories. Current directions in psychological science, [Online] 11 (2) pp. 79-82. Available at: http://faculty.knox.edu/fmcandre/CDIR1129.pdf [accessed April 7, 2009]. Miller, C., n.d. Empathy, social psychology, and global helping traits, [Online]. Available at: http://www.wfu.edu/millerc/Empathy.pdf [accessed April 7, 2009]. Myers, D.G., 2008. Social psychology. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Read More