Why Do People Help

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Altruism and Helping Behavior
concern for another’s welfare (Penner et al., 2005b). Let’s consider some of the reasons
behind helping and altruism, along with some of the conditions under which people
are most likely to help others.
Why Do People Help?
Even before their
second birthday, some children offer help
to those who are hurt or crying by snuggling, patting, or offering food or even
their own teddy bears. Their helpful actions are shaped by the norms established by their families and the broader
culture (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994).
A YOUNG HELPER
arousal: cost-reward theory
A theory
that attributes helping behavior to people’s efforts to reduce the unpleasant
arousal they feel when confronted with
a suffering victim, while also considering the costs involved.
The tendency to help others begins early in life, although at first it is not automatic.
Children have to learn to be helpful (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998). In most cultures, very
young children usually help others only when they are asked to do so or are offered a
reward (Grusec, Davidov, & Lundell, 2002). Still, observational studies have shown that
many children as young as eighteen months will spontaneously act to help a friend, a
family member, or even a stranger (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006; Zahn-Waxler et al.,
1992). As they grow older, children use helping behavior to gain social approval, and
their efforts at helping become more elaborate. The role of social influence in the development of helping is seen as children follow the examples set by people around them.
In addition, children are usually praised and given other rewards for helpfulness but
scolded for selfishness. Eventually most children come to believe that being helpful is
good and that they are good when they are helpful. By the late teens, people often help
others even when no one is watching and no one will know that they did so (Grusec
et al., 2002). There are three major theories about why people help even when they
cannot expect any external rewards for doing so.
Arousal: Cost-Reward Theory One approach to explaining why people help is
called the arousal: cost-reward theory (Piliavin et al., 1981). This theory proposes
that people find the sight of a victim distressing and anxiety-provoking and that this
experience motivates them to do something to reduce the unpleasant arousal. Before
rushing to a victim’s aid, however, the bystander will first evaluate two aspects of the
situation: the costs associated with helping and the costs (to the bystander and the other
person) of not helping. Whether or not the bystander actually helps depends on the
outcome of this evaluation (Dovidio et al., 1991). If the costs of helping are low (as
when helping someone pick up a dropped grocery bag) and the costs of not helping
are high (as when the other person is physically unable to do this alone), the bystander
will almost certainly help. However, if the costs of helping are high (as when helping
someone lift a heavy box into a car) and the costs of not helping are low (as when the
other person is obviously strong enough to do the job alone), the bystander is unlikely
to offer help. One of the strengths of the arousal: cost-reward theory is that it is broad
enough to explain several factors that affect helping.
The first of these factors is the clarity of the need for help (Dovidio et al., 1991). In
a laboratory study of this factor, undergraduate students waiting alone in a campus
building saw what appeared to be an accident involving a window washer. The man
screamed as he and his ladder fell to the ground; then he clutched his ankle and groaned
in pain. All the students looked out of the window to see what had happened, but only
29 percent of them did anything to help. Other students witnessed the same “accident,”
but with one important added element: The man said he was hurt and needed help.
In this case, more than 80 percent of the participants came to his aid (Yakimovich &
Saltz, 1971). Why so many? Apparently, this one additional cue eliminated any uncertainty about whether help was needed. The man’s more obvious need for help served
to raise the perceived costs of not helping him, thus making helping more likely.
If this laboratory study seems unrealistic, consider the March 2000 case of a sixty-twoyear-old woman in Darby, Pennsylvania. She was walking to the grocery store when she
was pushed from behind by an attacker. She fended him off and then did her shopping as
usual. It was only when she got home and her daughter saw the handle of a knife protruding from her back that she realized that the assailant had stabbed her! No one in the
grocery store said anything to her about the knife, let alone offered to help. Why? The most
likely explanation is that the woman did nothing to suggest that help was necessary.
The presence of others also has a strong influence on the tendency to help. Somewhat surprisingly, however, their presence actually tends to suppress helping behavior
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Chapter 14
Social Psychology
DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY
Does the man on the sidewalk need help?
The people walking by him are probably
not sure, and they might assume that if
he does need help, someone else will assist him. Research on factors affecting
helping suggests that if you are ever in
need of help, especially in a crowd, it is
important not only to clearly ask for help
but also to tell a specific onlooker to take
specific action (e.g., “You, in the yellow
shirt, please call an ambulance!”).
bystander effect A phenomenon in
which the chances that someone will
help in an emergency decrease as the
number of people present increases.
(Garcia et al., 2002). One of the most highly publicized examples of this phenomenon
occurred on a New York City street in 1964. During a thirty-minute struggle, a man
repeatedly stabbed a woman named Kitty Genovese, but none of the dozens of neighbors who witnessed the attack intervened or even called the police until it was too late
to save her life. A similar case occurred on November 27, 2000, in London, when a tenyear-old boy who had been stabbed by members of a street gang lay ignored by
passersby as he bled to death. After every such case, journalists and social commentators express dismay about the cold, uncaring attitudes that seem to exist among people
who live in big cities.
That description may apply to some people, but research stimulated by the Genovese
case has revealed a social phenomenon that offers a different explanation of why her
neighbors, like those passersby in London, took no action to help. This phenomenon,
called the bystander effect, can be described as follows: The chance that someone will
help in an emergency usually decreases as the number of people present increases (Garcia
et al., 2002). Why does the bystander effect occur? One explanation is that each witness assumes someone else will take responsibility for helping the victim. This diffusion
of responsibility among all the witnesses leaves each witness feeling less obligated to help
and thus lowers the perceived cost of not helping (Dovidio & Penner, 2001).
The degree to which the presence of other people will suppress helping may depend
on who those other people are. When they are strangers, perhaps poor communication
interferes with helping. Many people have difficulty speaking to strangers, particularly in
an emergency; and without speaking, they have difficulty knowing what the others intend
to do. According to this logic, if people are with friends rather than strangers, they should
be less embarrassed, more willing to discuss the problem, and more likely to help.
In a study designed to test this idea, an experimenter left a research participant in a
waiting room, either alone, with a friend, with a stranger, or with a stranger who was
actually the experimenter’s assistant (Latané & Rodin, 1969). The experimenter then
stepped behind a curtain into an office. For a few minutes, she could be heard opening
and closing the drawers of her desk, shuffling papers, and so on. Then there was a loud
crash, and she screamed, “Oh, my god—my foot, I—I can’t move it. Oh, my ankle—I
can’t get this—thing off me.” Then the participant heard her groan and cry.
Would the participant go behind the curtain to help? Once again, people were most
likely to help if they were alone. When one other person was present, participants were
more likely to communicate with one another and to offer help if they were friends
than if they were strangers. When the stranger was the experimenter’s assistant—who
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had been instructed not to help—very few participants offered to help. Other studies
have confirmed that bystanders’ tendency to help increases when they know one
another (Rutkowski, Gruder, & Romer, 1983).
Research suggests that the personality of the helper also plays a role in helping. Some
people are simply more likely to help than others. Consider, for example, the Christians who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. Researchers interviewed these rescuers many years later and compared their personalities with those
of people who had a chance to save Jews but did not do so (Midlarsky, Jones, &
Corley, 2005; Oliner & Oliner, 1988). The rescuers were found to have more empathy (the ability to understand or experience another’s emotional state; Davis, 1994),
more concern about others, a greater sense of responsibility for their own actions,
and greater confidence that their efforts would succeed. Louis Penner and his associates (Penner, 2002; Penner & Finkelstein, 1998) have found that these kinds of personality traits predict a broad range of helping behaviors, from how quickly
bystanders intervene in an emergency to how much time volunteers spend assisting
AIDS patients. Consistent with the arousal: cost-reward theory, these personality
characteristics are correlated with people’s estimates of the costs of helping and not
helping. For example, empathic individuals usually estimate the costs of not helping
as high, and people who are confident about their ability to help usually rate the costs
of helping as low (Penner et al., 1995).
Valuable as it is, the arousal: cost-reward theory cannot account for all aspects of
helping. For instance, it cannot easily explain why environmental factors affect helping.
Research conducted in several countries has shown that people in urban areas are generally less helpful than those in rural areas (Aronson et al., 2005). Why? The explanation probably has more to do with the stressors found in cities than with city living
itself. Studies of cities in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and
Africa found that people’s tendency to help was more strongly related to the population density (the number of people per square mile) where they lived than to the overall size of their city (Hedge & Yousif, 1992; Levine et al., 1994; Yousif & Korte, 1995).
The higher the density, the less likely people were to help others. Why should stress
make people less helpful? Two explanations have been suggested. The first is that stressful environments create bad moods—and, generally speaking, people in bad moods are
less likely to help (Salovey, Mayer, & Rosenhan, 1991). A second possibility is that noise,
crowding, and other urban stressors create too much stimulation. To reduce this stimulation, people may pay less attention to their surroundings, including less attention to
individuals who need help.
Empathy-Altruism Theory There are also situations in which matters of cost are
empathy-altruism theory A theory
suggesting that people help others because they feel empathy toward them.
not the major cause of a decision to help or not help. A second approach to explaining helping considers some of these situations. This second approach is embodied in
the empathy-altruism theory, which maintains that people are more likely to engage
in altruistic, or unselfish, helping—even at a high cost—if they feel empathy toward
the person in need (Batson, 1998). In one experiment illustrating this phenomenon,
students listened to a tape-recorded interview in which a young woman told how her
parents had died in an automobile accident, leaving no life insurance (Batson et al.,
1997). She said that she was trying to take care of her younger brother and sister
while going to college but that time and money were so tight that she might have to
quit school or give up her siblings for adoption. None of this was true, but the participants were told that it was. Before hearing the tape, half the participants were
given information about the woman that would increase their empathy for her; the
other half were not. After listening to the tape, all participants were asked to help the
woman raise money for herself and her siblings. Consistent with the empathy-altruism
theory, more participants in the empathy group offered to help than did those in the
control group.
Were the students who offered help in this experiment being utterly unselfish, or
could there have been other reasons for their apparent altruism? This is a hotly debated