Altruism in Everyday Life

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We can say a general understanding of altruism is a selfless behavior intended for the benefit of others at a personal cost to the individual who is preforming that behavior. These behaviors will have no obvious gain for the provider and could also have obvious costs for the one carrying out the behavior. Taking all of this into consideration can we say whether true altruism exists or not? It does not exist because no matter what you do whether it be giving a beggar a dollar or saving someone’s life you are going into a loss but you get something in return no matter what it is varying from fame to a feeling of satisfaction.

First off I’ll start off by talking about the bystander effect and how it could influence people’s altruistic behavior. Bystander effect is the phenomenon that when someone is in the need of help from anyone around, people who are around that person will only watch due to a few reasons like diffusion of responsibility and symbolic interactionism.

The bystander effect was first studied by two social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley. This all started after the incident of the infamous murdering of Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens New York. Kitty Genovese had just parked her car and started walking towards her apartment when she was attacked by her murderer and repeatedly stabbed three times over a half an hour period of time. As she was screaming for help while being stabbed to death, there were a total of 38 bystanders who heard her screams and some were even watching the event go on from their window and not a single one of these bystanders bothered help her or even call the police until it was too late and she was killed.

The bystander effect can be triggered by many different stimuli like diffusio...

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...uman a relaxing feeling of happiness. This is also counted as a reward and the human isn’t consciously aware of it, but he is aware of it subconsciously and he might be doing it intentionally without being aware of it.
To conclude everything that has been mentioned above altruism does not exist and it is a misconception, people do acts of kindness and no matter what it is they always get a reward in return whether the reward is tangible or not. People may also think that they are not getting a reward but they are and aren’t aware of it.

Works Cited

http://petergodfreysmith.com/KerrGSFeldmanAltruismTREE.pdf http://www.wilderdom.com/psychology/social/introduction/Altruism.html http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2007/07/altruism-and-th.html http://www.angelfire.com/psy/dlgfischer/ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201203/does-true-altruism-exist

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