Pro Social Helping Behaviour Essay

This essay critically examines pro-social, helping behaviour.

Pro-social behaviour is a social behaviour that is intended to help others prompted by feeling empathy or concern for others. Pro-social behaviour can be helping, sharing, donating or volunteering.

The term ‘altruism’ was developed to define ”Helping behaviour that is voluntary, costly to the altruist and motivated by something other than the expectation of material or social reward.” (Walster & Pilliavin, 1972)

Although many theories, such as the Evolutionary psychology theory suggest that altruism doesn’t exist and human beings always act in the purpose of self-interest.

The question is, why do people help, and what makes a person help others?

Can pro-social behaviour be truly altruistic, or do we just act in our own self-interest?

There are many factors that can contribute to an individual’s intention in helping others.

Many people help just by the influence of social or personal norms. The social responsibility norm is an unwritten rule in society that people should help others in the need of help even if doing so is costly. We learn altruistic behaviour trough observing our social environment. Social norms are adapted to us by our role models. We watch others’ behaviour, and that’s how we learn particular types of social behaviour. We learn empathy and kindness during childhood development, which are taught to us as important social values. We also learn reciprocity(mutual exchange) and social responsibility, which are key social norms in society. Although many of us wouldn’t help just because the result in helping wouldn’t be beneficial for us.

In many situations we feel empathy for others when they need help. The empathy-altruism hypothesis(Batson, 1991) state...

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...ysiological arousal to someone in distress

2. Cognitive process of how we interpret the situation

3. Cost-benefit analysis

Pro-social behaviour is more likely to occur if the cost of helping is low, and the benefit is high. Whenever we are in a situation, we run a cost-benefit analysis, where the possible costs are weighed up against our own benefit.

According to the Social Exchange Theory (Thibault & Kelley, 1959), we help each other when the cost-benefit analysis is positive, which means, the benefits are dominant comparing to the costs. If the cost of helping is higher than the benefit, it is less likely that we will help in a situation, which supports the theory that humans are rationally self-motivated and selfish.

Altruistic behaviour has a much higher occurrence, when we have some kind of attachment to the person in the need of help. (Social Psychology, 2014)