by: shengtian wu
Helping behaviors, such as donation, are very desirable social skills and associated with overall well-being and longevity (Martela & Ryan, 2016). But what motivates helping behaviors, given that helping others might bear some costs (e.g., spending time, material goods, or energy on others) for the self? Do we help for benefiting others or ourselves? Would there be certain situations where people more likely help others? This blog explains the reasons of helping behaviors and factors that impact our helping behaviors.
Reasons of Prosocial Behaviors
When others in distress, empathy, as an experience of what others are feeling, facilitate helping behaviors for reducing others’ distress (Davidov, Vaish, Knafo-Noam, & Hastings 2016). If the main reason of helping is benefiting others, then the motivation is altruism (Fiske, 2014, p. 336). Davidov and her colleagues reported that human beings also experience a tension when they see others have difficulty achieving their goals. The tension decreases if others achieved the goals. Thus, the helping behaviors genuinely aim at finishing others’ unattained goals, which, in turn, reduce individuals’ internal tense. If the intention of helping is to benefit ourselves, then it is called egoism.
Other than altruism and egoism, people help others for belonging to certain groups (Fiske, 2014). Then, helping behaviors of those people should be considered as playing their roles, conforming group norms, and facilitating the development of groups, instead of benefiting themselves or others. Furthermore, helping behaviors could be motivated by upholding moral standard. Even though helping others appear to be not benefiting them, others, or certain groups where the helpers belong, they would still help others because their moral standard urged them to do so.
Furthermore, Davidov and her colleagues (2016) indicated, evolutionally, promoting others’ welfare eventually benefited early human beings’ own survival. For example, a dependence on others was needed and promoted early ancestor’s survival when achieving a tough goal, such as hunting for a large animal. Another example would be teaching hunting skills for younger generations for the evolutionary purposes. While those motivations facilitate helping behaviors, what factors would increase or decrease likelihood of helping behaviors?
Factors That Influence Prosocial Behaviors
Features of the Recipient. In addition to the distressed condition of the recipients of prosocial behaviors, Martin and Olson (2015) described other features of the recipients. Adults exhibit prosocial behaviors toward others depending on how the recipients treated the actors and the third parties. That is, individuals tend to provide more help to those who have helped the actors or the third parties. Furthermore, Martin and Olson mentioned that adults tended to be prosocial toward not only people with whom they were familiar (e.g., friends or friends) or similar (e.g., have similar personality), but with whom they shared group membership (e.g., same racial identity).
Features of the Situations. Several situations also impact prosocial behaviors. Rewards seem to undermine a pure desire of prosocial behaviors, as actors’ prior intention might be replaced by receiving rewards. In contrast to the impact of rewards, the presence of others, either recipients or third parties, would motivate prosocial behaviors. Furthermore, individuals tend to provide more helps when there is a lower cost of help. For example, people more likely help others finish tasks, instead of giving something that costs money to solve problems, since the latter option would decrease the source of actors. Similarly, prosocial behaviors were observed more frequently when the actors perceived that they have relatively more resources than the recipients.
Furthermore, Vollhardt (2009) proposed that experiences of adverse or traumatic events also promoted prosocial behaviors toward others. The first motivation of helping was to cope with distress from actor’s prior traumatic events because helping others could distract them from stressful thoughts, increase the perception of confidence and competence, and make the actors happier. Second, because the recipients of help appear to be experiencing similar adverse events as the helpers, the helpers tend to consider the recipients as in-group members, which in turn lead to helping behaviors. Third, the helpers’ awareness of social norms and the needs of suffering individuals result in prosocial behaviors.
Features of the Actor. Actors themselves also have certain characteristics that impact their prosocial behaviors. Martin and Olson mentioned that positive mood of the actors would predict prosocial behaviors. They also suggested that acting prosocially might help maintain positive mood and mitigate negative mood. Moreover, exposing to others’ affiliative priming (i.e., behaviors that attract others to be their confederates) would more likely engage in prosocial behaviors. For instance, people would give higher tips to the server who showed a confederate smile to the actor. Furthermore, Schlosser and Levy (2016) found that individuals who tend to do downward comparisons (i.e., a comparison of oneself to those whose attributes, outcomes, or emotional states are worse than one’s own) more likely help others.
Conclusion
Overall, altruistic, egoistic, collective, and principled motivations of helping behaviors were identified. It appears that people could be altruistic when they feel empathy, but many factors could either facilitate or thwart the helping behaviors. Broadly, three factors reportedly play an important role in determining whether we will help others or not: features of helpers, recipients, and situations impact individuals’ helping behaviors.
- Fiske, S. T. (2014). Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology (3rd edition). Hoboken,NJ:Wiley.
- Davidov, M., Vaish, A., Knafo-Noam, A., & Hastings, P. D. (2016). The motivational foundations of prosocial behavior from a developmental perspective-evolutionary roots and key psychological mechanisms: Introduction to the special section. Child Development, 87(6), 1655-1667. doi:10.1111/cdev.12639
- Martin, A., & Olson, K. R. (2015). Beyond good and evil: What motivations underlie children's prosocial behavior? Perspectives On Psychological Science, 10(2), 159-175. doi:10.1177/1745691615568998
- Martela, F., & Ryan, R. (2016). Prosocial behavior increases well-being and vitality even without contact with the beneficiary: Causal and behavioral evidence. Motivation & Emotion, 40(3), 351-357.
- Schlosser, A. E., & Levy, E. (2016). Helping others or oneself: How direction of comparison affects prosocial behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(4), 461-473. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2016.02.002
- Vollhardt, J. (2009). Altruism born of suffering and prosocial behavior following adverse life events: A review and conceptualization. Social Justice Research, 22(1), 53-97. doi:10.1007/s11211-009-0088-1