Factors Involved in Understanding Helping Behavior - Case Study Example

I. Introduction Helping others is a generally acclaimed virtue, as confirmed by the premise of kindness and altruism for the welfare and benefit of others contained in the sacred doctrines of various religions all over the world. Take, for instance, the subject matter of helping, as it is depicted in the Bible’s story of the Good Samaritan. Early psychological studies on helping behaviour concentrated primarily on circumstances comparable to that confronted by the Good Samaritan. Such circumstances frequently entail spur-of-the-moment behaviour carried out in response to an urgent, severe need. Researches on bystander involvement demonstrate this form of research. Such studies frequently involve individuals who meet another individual, normally a stranger, who is under some distress such as needing extra change, and a plain and simple act such as lending a quarter will ordinarily give an instant solution to the present problem. Apparently, circumstances necessitating bystander involvement frequently are immediately obvious and may generate distress among spectator, actors and victims. Furthermore, those who help victims in such circumstances can at times risk their own lives such as helping disabled individuals in the bombed World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; or going underwater into the glacial Potomac River to help casualties of Air Florida Flight 90. The misery and explicit satisfaction experienced by spectators of such righteous acts, as well as the depression when such circumstances trigger no action, frequently attract media attention. It is unsurprising then, these such apparent, clear helping circumstances and the psychological factors that add to bystanders’ involvement or inaction have been the centre of media and social scientists’ attention. In this paper, those aforementioned psychological factors contributing to the helping and non-helping behaviour of individuals will be discussed inclusively. II. The Bystander Effect Previous studies suggest that the chances of getting help diminish as the number of bystander increases. There are two probable reasons to describe the bystander effects, namely, diffusion of responsibility and a social norms illustration (Miller, 2004). A great deal of studies on helping behaviour has made use of experimental techniques to examine circumstances in which an individual has an unexpected urgency for help. Factors such as clearness, exigency of the need, racial background, age, gender or disability of the victim, the number of possible helpers are at hand and the connection between subject and victim have been controlled. For instance, researchers have contrasted helping behaviour in urban and rural areas, finding out without fail that helping strangers is more probable in slightly populated regions all over the world (Miller, 2004). North and colleagues (2004) discovered that subjects are more probable to lend a hand when they are in an upbeat mood, roused by music. On the other hand, Wegner & Crano (1975) discovered that racial background can as well be an influential factor for helping behaviour. Several researches revealed that the presence of other spectators lessens the chances that any one individual will exhibit a helping behaviour. Dissimilar to rationality, there does not appear to be protection in numbers as the victim seems to have a higher probability of getting help when there is only one witness present rather than several. Two probable psychological accounts suggested to illustrate the bystander effect are diffusion of responsibility and a social norms description (Karakashian et al., 2006). A. Diffusion of Responsibility among Bystanders Latane & Nida (1981) devised a framework that bystanders conform to in deciding whether to help or not. Based on this framework, a bystander initially encounters five steps before deciding to help or not to help. Helping behaviour can, nevertheless, be held back at any phase of the process and afterwards no help is given. These five steps are: first, the bystander has to become aware of an event that is taking place; second, the bystander has to recognise the event as an emergency; third, the bystander has to assume responsibility for helping, yet could evade taking accountability through believing that someone else will; fourth, the bystander has to make a decision on the necessary helping response; and lastly, the bystander has to execute that response. In the perspective of diffusion of responsibility in step three, each bystander becomes aware of the event and identifies that help is needed, yet fails to take action because they think that someone else will assume accountability. This can be perceived as way of trimming down the psychological consequence of not helping. The consequence such as humiliation and guilt are common among the group, lessening the probability of bystander involvement (Miller, 2004). B. Social Norms Bryan and Test (1967) have demonstrated that the bystander effect does not appear to look like as if a helping response is initially formed by another spectator, which appears to negate the ideal of diffusion of responsibility. Bryan and Test (1967) indicate that this particular behaviour can be clarified by a course of mechanism of compliance to social norms. The social norms model assumes that individuals make use of actions from other individuals as signs to decide what a fitting response to particular circumstances should be. The technique used by Bryan and Test (1967) is, nevertheless, not entirely analogous to the long-established helping paradigm as demonstrated by Latane and Nida (1981). The investigation by Bryan and Test (1967) included two independent events: the driver first sees a driver in need being helped by somebody and a while later sees another driver in need that is not being helped (as cited in Miller, 2004, 53). Separating these two events removes the likelihood of diffusion of responsibility in the sense that there are no bystanders present in the second event and the subject is unaccompanied inside the car. The purpose of the study is to check what explanation, whether diffusion or responsibility or social norms, is relevant to helping responses in a non-urgent circumstance. Given that the diffusion or responsibility description is accurate, then the numbers of individuals giving help is lesser when there are present bystanders who are not helping compared to if there are no present bystanders (Bryan & Test, 1967). The social norms descriptions expect that helping responses are increased when a bystander tender help in contrast to when there are no present bystander. III. The Altruistic and Egoistic Dimensions of Helping Behaviour What is the importance of moral contemplation? What gains to do we obtain from endeavouring in this manner of perceiving ourselves and our fellow people? It is sensible to think that the answer is somehow related to helpfulness and mutual aid. In some unclear way we anticipate that an individual who views human interactions with respect to desirable quality, responsibility or fairness is more probable to a valuable member of the society than an individual who views these notions as completely strange. Certainly, one could consider natural selection as an aggressive competition where the awards go to uncivilized individualist. A great deal of the literature on the subject matter of how helpful behaviours could spontaneously arise admits to involve the development of altruism, yet this a concept that has, throughout the years, been obscured and misrepresented in discourses about evolution, resulting into continuous uncertainty and flawed conclusions in some areas (Miller, 2004). Altruism is generally defined as “acting with the intention of benefiting another individual, where this is motivated by a non-instrumental concern for his or her welfare” (Miller, 2004, 27). The opposite of altruism is selfishness. Whether an action or a deed is altruistic or egotistical depends on the purposeful encouraging reasons for which it was carried out, the thought in light of which it was done, not on who gets the benefit from its performance. Some individuals are uncertain whether any individual deeds are altruistic in relation to this; they assume that all actions are performed from the final intention of self-gain. Several human actions are performed from a sincere empathy for others, and are not provoked by purposes of self-gain (Wuthnow, 1991). Meanwhile, psychological egoism states that it is recognised as a fact in human psychology that all individuals at all times act in their self-interests. Based on psychological egoism, it is factual of average adults and not merely abnormal adults or children that humans constantly pursue their personal interests and gains (Miller, 2004). Given that psychological egoism is accurate, then when we look like helping somebody out of selfless intentions, we are in fact helping to our own gain and interest, for the reason that helping another individual is something that satisfies our personal needs. And if lending a hand to someone else failed to satisfy our needs then we would not prefer to do it because we merely have our personal needs as a top priority. On the other hand, ethical egoism is an assumption of normative ethics and states that an individual has to merely act in manners that will make the most of his or her self-interest (Miller, 2004). Another way to illustrate this is that an individual is never compelled to do anything apart from that which will benefit him or her. If helping someone else is not to his or her advantage, then he or she is subjected to no moral obligation to be of assistance to that person. Nonetheless, there are several things we know for certain: the hurt is shocking and it is disturbing. Specifically, it is not the direct experience of pain that the injured parties frequently experience; instead, it is an affective reaction to someone else’s pain. Hence, to attempt to understand the intangible character of this distress, it is sensible to explore the literature on the connection between vivid affective responses and the inclination to help. Spontaneous distress is a sort of self-centred, extremely aversive, stimulation-based emotional condition that stems from exposure to signs of pain or distress from an injured party. Upon distinguishing the victim’s suffering, a spectator is assumed to experience disagreeable stimulation and to seek means for lessening of that stimulation. In the most obviously communicated helping framework on this motivational concept, the spectator is viewed as having a cost-benefit focus and, therefore, as seeking for the least costly way for stimulation reduction. When helping a sufferer, and hence, ending his or her misery, provides the least costly way, it must be the behaviour of preference in the circumstance (Miller, 2004). On the other hand, there are studies exploring the relationship between normative distresses and helping behaviour. Normative distress refers to objectionable sentiment resulting from the breach of both social and personal norms of behaviour. For the recent decades, social scientists have speculated and acknowledged the presence of particular social norms that advice in support of helping responses (Miller, 2004). Based on such a norm, specifically of social responsibility, helping behaviour in the company of a distressed other is positively recognised in our traditions, while failing to lend a hand to the needy is negatively recognised. The need to deal with social approval and disapproval, in that case, can be one negotiator of the judgment to help. IV. Conclusion Therefore, what we have is proofs of a helping continuity that, most probably, is altruistically arbitrated since when we examine one at a time the descriptive power of key egoistic options, helping stays grand. Even though the theoretical and practical quality of the literature itself is noteworthy, for me, the limitation of studies on helping behaviour is that the empathy-altruism assumption is confirmed indirectly, by evasion. This is of particular concern provided that the one-at-a-time outline of attack on egoistic options. Specifically, it is believable that, if reflexive distress was removed as an underlying factor in elevated helping response in one set of investigational methods that a different egoistic option, such as depression, may have remained causal at that point. Likewise, if the probable underlying influence of depression was lessened in a different set of investigational methods, it is possible that another egoistic option, such as regard for social approval or self-interest, might have been vigorous; and similarly for each of the other groupings of egoistic intentions. The argument is that to put forth the strongest proof for the altruistic arbitration of helping under a particular set of circumstances, it appears necessary to carry out studies with methods that remove, at the same time, the descriptive power of each of the egoistic options. Thus looks like for me as an investigational duty that has not yet been carried out. References Bryan, J. & Test, M.A. (1967). Models and helping: Naturalistic studies in aiding behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . Karakashian, L. M. et al. (2006). Fear of Negative Evaluation Affects Helping Behavior: The Bystander Effect Revisited. North American Journal of Psychology . Latane, B. & Nida, S. (1981). Ten years of research on group size and helping. Psychological Bulletin . Miller, A. (2004). The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. New York: Guilford Press. North, A. et al. (2004). The effcts of music on helping behavior: A field study. Environment and Behavior . Wegner, D. & Crano, W.D. (1975). Racial Factors in Helping Behavior: An Unobtrusive Field Experiment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . Wuthnow, R. (1991). Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press. Read More