Reading

• Pro social behaviour


  Acts that benefit another person (altruistic behaviour)
• Pro social behaviour


  Acts valued positively by society and have positive social consequences (such as contributing to the physical or psychological well-being of someone) (Laureen Wispe, 1972), prosocial behaviour- can range from acts of charity to sympathy and trust (has subcategories: helping behaviour and altruism)
• Helping behaviour


  Intentional and benefits others
• Helping can be antisocial, such as overhelping – giving to make others look inferior (Gilbert & Silvera, 1996)
• Altruism


  Acts which show concern for others and performed without expectation of personal gain (should be selfless but hard to prove true selflessness, Batson, 1991)
• Ervin Staub (1977) – sometimes private rewards such as feeling good or being virtuous associated with prosocial behaviour, so cannot know for sure if it is selfless
• The Kitty Genovese murder in 1964 = focused attention on the psychology of not helping and on how groups act as impediments to helping (Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007), they examined archival material to make the claim was there really 38 witness and did they remain inactive? there is actually no evidence to show that
• Kitty Genovese murder = her cries for help didn't induce any of her neighbours to come help her, later an anonymous witness called to report the crime and 38 witnesses reported hearing her screams and cries, but nobody called for help
• Psychologists and philosophers assumed that human behaviour is egoistic and therefore it was hard to explain prosocial behaviour (independent of reinforcements and reflects an optimistic view of human beings)
• Nature-nurture controversy


  Classic debate about whether genetic or environmental factors determine human behaviour. Scientists generally accept that is an interaction of both
• Evolutionary social psychology


  Views complex social behaviour as adaptive, helping the individual, kin and the species as a whole to survive
• There is some genetic aspect to altruism and prosocial behaviour (e.g. cleaner fish enter the mouths of their hosts to remove parasites even at the risk of being eaten. Stevens et al., 2005, p.499)
• Two reliable explanations by Stevens et al. (2005) of cooperative behaviour in animals and humans

  • Mutualism - cooperative behaviour benefits the cooperator as well as others; a defector will do worse than a cooperator
  • Kin selection - those who cooperate are biased towards blood relatives because it helps propagate their own genes; a lack of direct benefit to the cooperator indicates altruism