Prosocial Behavior & Bystander Effect Explained | Social Psychology MOOC Lecture 12

[00:00:00][Music] good morning welcome back to Social Psychology today we will be talking about pro-social Behavior helping Behavior altruism positive things that we encounter uh but we will also talk about some downsides and when helping behavior is not provided or denied or refused at the end of today's lecture I will show you a short video in German and we stopped the uh video recording for this because we experienced these problems in the past uh when when I showed the videos so please stay until the end and and there will be a a small a short video um so it's our second last lecture next week we meet for attraction and close relationships and then there will only be a a session where you can come by and ask all questions that that you wanted to ask or haven't understood or uh wanted information on last week we talked about aggression and violence despite some disagreement about what aggression entails there appears to be consensus that aggression at least involves hurting people and destruction of property actual harm or injury to persons the intention to harm or all of the above yes please the intention to harm the intention to harm it's not necessary in Social psychological definition terms it's not necessary that actually harm is done to someone uh but the intention to harm some other human being or some other living being who avoids this treatment yes please I have a question because um when I did the quiz um the um answer was the last answer and I thought that all of the above means um the um answers that are uh over over the I can't explain I I thought um um all of the above is right because above there was only answer a and answer C and answer B was the last one you know what I mean I know what you mean um all of the above would still have been not correct because the intention to harm the last one would have been correct but obviously the all of the above should always come last I I think this was an error made by the random shuffling around of answer Alternatives in the moo program but the intention to harm is a correct answer no matter where all of the above comes understand because all of the above means that all yeah but they AR all wrong except the intention to harm at least the intention to harm is involved hurting people and destruction of property or actual harm and injury does not is not involved about aggression as far as we Define them in Social psychological terms the consensus is about the intention to harm needs to be involved not the other elements okay okay okay s uh almost everyone got this one right but I do understand that there might have been some confusion um the intention to arm is a necessary element of the definition not the actual harm or actual destruction of property let us say we want to study violence in young children we got to a preschool setting where we set up a large soft plastic doll and arranged for an adult to punch it I showed you this little video of bandora's research with the bubble doll later we observe how often individual children hit the doll the measure of hitting the doll is bad luck for the doll an experimental analog of aggression unacceptable under ethical guidelines or a direct test of violence in children yes please B an experimental analog of aggression so it's very difficult to study aggression in the laboratory and we can obviously not make people hurt each other in the laboratory uh but this is an experimental analog I told you about the hot Source Paradigm or the ice waterer treatment uh sometimes electric shocks are used that are typically not applied to the other participants um Etc so we have a number of experimental analogues that we use and we infer if children would hit a doll then they might also hurt other children when they see an adult behaving this way everyone got this correct should alence be allowed to play very violent video games this debate brings into conflict two opposing social psychological views one is contact hypothesis versus social evolutionary theory another might be social learning theory versus ktic hypothesis the inverted U curve hypothesis versus the J curve or psychodynamics versus S jungian archetype yes please and B is correct social learning theory which is bandura and the Bobo doll even when children are only shown an adult hitting the Bobo doll on video or on film material uh they behave more aggressively afterwards and social learning theory would predict that the same thing would happen when we play violent games on computers the cat this hypothesis from Freud from psychoanalysis would predict the opposite would predict that if you can act out and let off steam by behaving aggressively in the media playing games that should lower your aggressive impulses and you should behave less aggressively afterwards experimental evidence is supporting the social learning theory and everyone got this right congratulations the essence of idea behind the weapons effect slightly overstated is that big guns are needed to sort out little people shootings are caused by the gun not the person pop off others because before they pop off you or a shot in time saves nine yes please B shootings are caused by the gun not the person obviously this is overstated uh and maybe that's why some of you didn't choose the right answer but the weapons effect in essence says whenever aggressive cues are around this makes it more likely that people people act aggressively themselves and particularly so when they are frustrated before they enter the situation in which aggressive cues are around yes please wasn't one of the other alternative the one with explanations how this work so so iose answer because I thought the explan yeah I do see what you mean that there was this uh this five explanations um about media influence on aggressiveness uh and why it works and this was one of the explanation you are right um I'm just asking myself whether it was a weapons effect as such so seeing violence on television draws to some interferences makes it more likely that you think that there's more violence than actually it occurs it makes it more likely that you become numed it makes it it more likely that you learn the aggressive acts and are therefore less capable of Behaving aggressively and I'm not sure whether this is a weapons effect maybe I refer to the media the media in general terms but but yeah but I'm not sure myself so it it could also relay to it but because why does the weapons effect occur and and some of these explanation clearly also are linked to why does the weapons effect occur and uh I will not ask this in the final example oh um in the uh in the discussion forum on the moo uh I asked you to discuss whether you think that uh practicing martial arts would reduce aggressive behavior or would make people more likely to be aggressive in everyday situations there was only uh little discussion on the moo uh I don't know whether you've seen the discussion there was one uh colleague from the US who of course uh and I had expected this uh uh question the Sunday Times and he was relatively strict and these are not ordinary Americans ordinary Americans don't run around with their guns all the time and particularly not in front of their their children Etc and and I perfectly agree it was certainly an overstatement of the Sunday Times And as I told you um I uh I know none American none of my friends and colleagues in America who uh I know have weapons or would show off their weapons as they did here uh rather than going into the discussion I would briefly tell you about a little diploma CES that I have supervised and I I just got it uh the final results last week um this student Floria metler has surveyed about 400 people half of them men half of them women and um 2/3 of the men and onethird of the women who participated in the survey regularly uh practice martial arts all sorts of martial arts like uh Judo or karate um and floran uh presented two scenarios and in one scenario um a man was behaving very aggressively towards a woman that that was come came with a little photograph and was then explained you are standing on a bus stop and you're just observing uh that a man is uh behaving aggressively towards a woman and he might lose his temper and and uh hit her what would you do and then we offered them a number of uh possible things that they could do and what we were interested in uh do people who practice the martial arts behave differently or intend to behave differently than people who don't practice the martial arts and why might this be the case so we ask them questions about the Norms in this situation we ask them questions about their own perceived self efficacy to behave correctly in these situations we ask them about their fear of getting hurt themselves if they would intervene etc etc I only want to show you two uh two results we found a number of uh significant differences uh and most of them in line with with our hypothesis and these are only two results we ask them would you do something verbally would you say something to the aggressor or shout something so verbal uh uh intervention and you see the red line are women the Blue Line are men uh the left dots are the ones uh who don't practice martial arts on the right they are the ones who practice martial arts and what you see is that um for men there was no significant difference no risks no stars so no significant difference on average they were a little higher than than women particularly so when they don't practice martial arts women don't intervene verbally men do but women who do practice martial arts are also more likely to do something about the situation and intervene in a verbal way when we look at physical interventions so would you physically go to the situation and inter corupt or make the uh the the male aggressor stop the situation you see first the big main effect of gender women on average would less physically intervene in this situation but women who practice the martial arts are much more likely to intervene physically than women who do not practice martial arts this is a difference of about one scale point but the same is true for men as well so men who practice martial arts are more likely to intervene physically and these effects that people practicing the martial arts would do more about these situations is due to their increased self-efficacy so they believe that they can do something about it without getting hurt or um yeah hurt themselves I think this is interesting uh and we should follow this up uh with more studies and and we have to analyze it in more detail I wanted to show you that uh there are differences between men and women there are differences between people who practice a martial arts the police would typically say that you in these situations and we talk about these situations today uh more often in these situations you should typically not physically intervene you should typically not go to the aggressor and try to to uh grip him or or her uh and physically intervene but what you should do is do something and we will learn today that this does not this often does not happen and we will explore the reasons for why this is the case okay and this is a typical situation I yeah please one more question to theal Arts the question is about people practicing the martial arts are more aggressive this was just if they intervene in aggressive situations so does that make aggressive because they help the victim or no no no it doesn't make them more aggressive I I think practicing the martial arts gives them the confidence that they can successfully intervene in this situation and this is a good thing this is a good thing I I only added this statement that the police would typically suggest and train people in training courses about civil courage uh not to intervene physically because typically when you are not an experienced martial arts uh fighter uh the risk that you get hurt yourself is is too high but you should do something use your mobile phone call the police try to get help from others shout etc etc and um both verbally and physically people who do practice the martial arts are more likely to do something and this is good yeah yes please I got a friend um I nearly grow up with him I learned him to know as a child and he started um I think was 25 um yitsu and he made several grades and he's always uh fighting on competition and interesting thing is when uh before he he started withu yitsu he um got more involved in in physical um fights fights uh than after and so I asked him one time because later he was more arguing more more with his words and I asked him why why is this why did you change now you have more strengths and then he said um because I I know in a fight yeah you can always find someone who is better and I know how how um hard you can injured I I try more um to solve the problems without uh physical yeah um yeah I think many martial arts uh uh also come with some certain philosophy that it's better to not use your strength and not use violence uh we haven't explored it in detail I I I uh as I said we we should explor this in more detail from the 150 men who practice martial arts uh we have 49 who practice kickboxing we have uh 27 Gio Jitsu we have 22 boxers 24 karate uh Fighters 21 Judo Fighters etc etc so it would be interesting to see whether there are differences between the martial arts but we haven't looked at it be um now okay um so this would be a typical situation you turn the corner of the street to see a man sprawled across the foot paths in front of you what would you do what things might you want to know more about deciding on how to act um and of course if we think about it of course we would think yes I would do something but let's look at what people in practice do how researchers have uh constructed interesting experiments and clever experiments uh and we want to find out why people help others but sometimes do not help others we will explore a number of theoretical approaches and I will also towards the end of the lecture provide you some examples of Applied context some background some models situational models in particular we will also talk about the person in the equation altruism and empathy so there's a lot of helpful and pro-social behavior in our environment every day you can read in the newspaper that people help each other that people volunteer to do uh good work uh we have people who are engaged in Pro social behavior because of their professional roles like nurses or firefighters we have uh Larger than Life examples of Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa who are examples of altruistic helping pro-social uh people so there's a lot of evidence that people doing good in our society but in 1964 in a neighborhood in New York uh Kitty jovis a 20-year-old uh woman came home late at night with her car from work she got attacked by a man uh uh she got stabbed she got sexually molested she could escape this man and flee a 100 yards or so uh then her attacker got her again and finally killed her and the police had found uh that about 30 people were watching this instance and it took 30 minutes before the per first person asked for help this is what you find in the textbooks there are now some more critical stories about the Kitt jovisa murder and it seems that the journalist who have brought this to the attention of the public and the researchers who were interested in it uh has over exagerated the number of potential Witnesses and he has uh not provided the exact information that the police had in fact the first call to a police station arrived there a few minutes after the first attack but the fact is this event took about 30 minutes and Within These 30 minutes there were at least 30 people who observed this and who could have done something and no one did anything like intervening shouting trying to get help in this situation yes there was a call to the police and this was certainly better than nothing but it didn't help uh Ki Jova and this Kitt Genova murder stimulated and heavily influenced the entire field of pro-social behavior we will look at research on the so-called bystander intervention uh effect in particular and I will show you some experimental paradigms that researchers have used to find out stimulated by the ketogen ofu murder how come that so many people observe situations like these and don't intervene and if you enter bystander effect or bystander intervention in YouTube you find dozens of videos where people are lying on the streets and no one is helping cars driving around these people but not stopping etc etc so it's not only the kitta murder and it's not in my eyes it's not so relevant whether it was 25 or 35 people and whether it took two minutes or 20 minutes before the first call uh arrived at the police station it's fact that all too often people do not intervene although they should and we will explore the theoretical models and experimental evidence for this yes please are there also studies in in Asia because there other cultures there there is a little evidence and I will talk about this uh later on yes pro-social behavior is a broad Cate atory that refers to all acts that are positively valued by Society so pro-social behavior is the broadest domain it's every act that is positively valued by Society this includes helping behavior and altruistic behaviors helping Behavior refers to intentional acts that are designed to benefit another person so pro-social Behavior can also be helpful Behavior Behavior but people do it because of a social role because they are nurses so they do something good but maybe because it's part of their social role and they don't run around with the intention to benefit or help other people all the time and alteristic behavior is a narrowest category this is behavior that refers to behaviors motivated by the desire to benefit another with no expectation of personal gain or reward sometimes or often it is difficult to identify purely altruistic Behavior because motives of or rewards may be internal we don't know whether Mother Teresa was such a good woman woman out of her sheer alteristic desire to benefit as many people as possible or whether she had some hidden motive to become famous or to get rewards by other people or Norms of reciprocity we can assume that mother terissa is an altruistic person but we simply don't know because the motives may be entirely internal and therefore it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between altruistic behavior and helping Behavior often we can clearly identify helping Behavior because people refer to the reciprocity norm uh and for pro-social Behavior we simply know it's good behavior we value it by Society if people engage in these ways but we don't know whether people do it just because they are paid for it or unintentionally Etc yes please I think the reason could be a religion because in religion you will get a reward after your death when you come to God yeah God will will give you yeah so when nuns or priests uh behave positively they may not be altruistic because they are so oriented towards the ultimate reward that their respective religion promises them we simply don't know so I'm not sure if it is is really altruistic um if it is um if people who are not religious can be really altruistic I'm not sure posi you mean whether atheists can be altruistic I think they cannot you think they cannot I I would think they can but they will not do it [Laughter] um in definition definitory terms in social psychology I would think the opposite is true for atheists you can at least exclude that they show the behavior because they hope or know that they will be rewarded in their next life for religious people you may not exclude this so it's more difficult to say that someone who is a strong believer say in uh in Catholic or Protestant religion shows a truly altruistic Behavior without any expectation of reward because this reward may lay lie in the in the distant future yes please but maybe someone who tends to be altruistic um chooses a religion or a job like nurse because he this may also be true yes but I I would think this is also irrespective yeah or it might go together so altruism having a job that is designed to help other people and altruistic motives May nicely meet in some people but this is not necessary I I know doctors and nurses who are not strong Believers uh and I also do not know some religious people I I uh I was educated in a Catholic school and uh 12 of my 13 teachers were priests and I can assure you some of them didn't behave altruistically uh at least some of the time so I think n sometimes it goes together and people who have altruistic motives uh probably also are more religious or vice versa you don't know what is the cause and what is the effect um and sometimes these people are also choosing jobs that allow them to help others but this does not necessarily be the case so by and large altruism is a the narrowest uh category the importance is that there's no expectation of reward helping Behavior includes any act that helps others regardless of their motive and prosocial behavior is the widest category any act positively valued by the group or Society even if it includes motives such as earning money so why do people help there are two major developmental approaches which have attempted to explain the origin and the nature of pro-social behavior one is a biological approach typically we refer to this as evolutionary social psychology the other again as we have heard last week is social learning theory most social Psych ologist would agree that we should not emphasize a biological approach too much but we should integrate these two dimensions and combine both empathy that can be learned and arousal that has a biological component and here's one example of how this uh can be combined uh so looking at the differences between men and women on average we typically see that women do show a little bit more helping Behavior Uh so there might be some biological role involved but this study uh where um distressed teenagers who were suffering from acne uh for example were described to men and women and then their empathic response was uh was measured on a questionnaire and the light colored bars are those of people who didn't have prior experience with the same problem the darker bars are those who did have the same problems and you see that there's an interaction between men and women in the way that women show much higher empathic uh responses but only if they have prior experience with the problem themselves so if they have learned how it feels to be ridiculed by others for example and if they could use this EMP empathic uh feeling to all also show an empathic response to the distressed teenager so sometimes our biolog biology and not sometimes most of the times biology interacts with learning and how we grow up and what teaches and what peers and uh parents expect of us and teach us evolutionary psychology is the attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that evolved over time a according to the principles of natural selection so Darin's principle of survival of the fittest those animals and humans survive and spread their genetic pool to the Next Generation who are the fittest the fittest does not mean the strongest the fittest means those who most can adapt to changes in the environment typically strength helps a bit but you see or you know or we know from the dinosaurs that strength is not everything sometimes it's a particular tiny uh uh animals that survive uh better than than than the large ones and the strong ones so the principle of natural selection would predict that those things survive and are spread across our genetic pool that help uh cope with changing environments so how should altruistic Behavior help people doing that imagine you are a man or women standing on the Savannah of Africa 200,000 years ago and there's a wild animal attacking someone from your group helping this person might destroy your own uh likelihood of survival so from Pure altruistic Behavior POS a problem for for evolutionary theory If an organism acts altruistically it may decrease its own reproductive Fitness and therefore uh the idea of kin selection was spread this is the idea that behaviors help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection because the gene pool of a group needed to be transferred to the Next Generation and if we can help our gene pool from our relatives to survive then we may also engage in altruistic Behavior even if we destroy our own life and here you see the degree of kinship in a study by Bernstein at Al uh 1/ half one quarter or 1/8 of shared genes I think this one half is brothers or sisters and uh you see helping Behavior tendency to help across a variety of situation when people are sick in everyday situation uh when they are sick and it's a life or death situation so like donating a kidney or a liver uh or when the other person is healthy and again it's an everyday or life or death situation you see that there's a main effect across situation so we would rather help someone in an everyday problem when say they have a hurt leg and cannot do the shopping and you offer them help and uh buy the groceries for them so everyone seems to help more in this situation than when it's about donating kidneys or livers to others uh but you also see that it is more likely and this is the other main effect to help your brothers and sisters than to help distance cousins and we are more likely to help distance cousins um when they are healthy then when they are uh when they are sick because it makes it more likely for the genes to survive when you help them so you would rather donate a kidney to someone um no sorry uh it's less likely to help someone donating a kidney when this person is sick anyway and the likelihood that this person will spread their genes uh is lower than when these people are are healthy okay so there's an interaction effect of the severeness of the situation the type of relation or degree of kinship to the other person and the likelihood healthy or sick uh whether this person is going to survive and spread our genes our in terms of we are relatives um and it's not an easy answer that we do help or not help but it obviously depends on these three factors but this is evidence um that supports this idea of kin selection the closer we are related to people the more likely we are to help them both in everyday and in more serious situations one way you could argue why evolutionary psychology is useful is also the norm of reciprocity so you could argue okay I help my brother more because I would also expect my brother to help me when I'm sick or when I need uh uh kidney donated by him um and this is called the norm of reciprocity this is the expectation that helping others will increase the likelihood that they will help us in the future and why should this be learned in evolutionary context this has been uh put forward by Simon he has suggested that in the development over many many generations we learn these societal norms and those people who learn these Norms best have a competitive Advantage they are fit to the environment because they are rewarded by other people and by the by uh the group um and one important social societal Norm is altruism and therefore the people who learn it best are more likely to spread their genes and that's why altruism has survived throughout mankind uh although it may or although it contradict Darin's very first original ideas we can also look at it uh from a social exchange perspective if we help others there are costs and there are rewards and social exchange theory argues that much of what we do stems from the desire to maximize our outcomes and minimize our costs it argues like social evolutionary theory it's based on self-interest but unlike it it does not assume that this has a genetic basis so it's more likely that we help our brother than we help someone we don't know because it's more likely that our brother will also do something good to us in the future there's a give and take and it's better to show positive behavior behaviors to people who we know will respond likewise Adam Grant um who is a management professor at uh Warton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania he has just written a book give and take this is a very interesting uh book a very interesting read uh he has uh accumulated a lot of studies by himself themselves and by other people's people in organiz about people in organized ations that are either givers or takers and what he shows is that people who give who give more to others than they receive from them in the short run may lose out on those who take as much as possible when it's about income when it's about promotion uh when it's about getting customers uh contracts jobs giving is not necessarily beneficial in the short run but it's beneficial in the long run and it's particularly good for organizations so organizations managers should encourage helpful Behavior because this helps the organization overall to be better off why what are the rewards of helping helping can be rewarding in three ways it can increase the probability that someone will help us in return like social exchange theory would predict it can also relieve us from the personal distress if you are a bystander and you see a situation in which you ask yourself is that an emergency should I help I don't like this man attacking this woman it causes you stress so if you help it relieves you from some of this distress and it can gain a social approval by others I mean we give medals to people we uh we read stories about people in the newspaper who have uh um done heroic deeds in in uh rescuing or saving other people's life uh so it gives us approval by others and therefore increases our self-worth so it's not only about the material benefits that we would get from uh reciprocity but it helps also reducing stress and increasing self-esteem but there are also costs and therefore helping Behavior decreases the more costs are involved one other concept is empathy empathy was um was introduced by Gregory Batson bson um proposes that people often help purely out of the goodness of their hearts such as we assume for Mother Teresa there's no other motive they are internally good people and therefore they help and here argues that pure altruism is most likely to come into play when we experience empathy for the person in need when we are able to experience the event and emotion the same way that this other person experiences them and some people are good and some people are less good in experiencing empathy um in the recent uh this February issue of the Harvard Business manager there's an article by Daniel Goldman uh the guy who invented the emotional intelligence uh concept and Daniel Coleman makes some suggestions for how managers can train and learn empathy because it's also useful for them to manage their people better if they experience events and emotions of others the same way that these people do and the empathy altruism hypothesis states that when we feel empathy for a person we will attempt to help this person for altruistic reasons regardless of what we have to gain when we can feel the same way that this person feels we are more inclined to help this person irrespectively of the costs and rewards and as I said empathy is something like a trade some people are more empathetic than others but it can also be learned another variable that determines whether we help people or not is situational factors and it has been shown that people living in rural areas are typically more helpful than people who live in urban areas this is a study by Amato uh who went into different cities in the United States some very small villages with less than th000 people living in them uh small towns with 5,000 or up to 20,000 participants and very large cities with over 1 million inhabitants and he asked people uh for help with very simple requests so showing people a number of colors and asking them which color they would suggest for a new advertising campaign uh asking people about correction correcting wrong directions to the way to the station um helping people who have a hurt leg doing some shopping for them or asking them to donate some money for charity and you see that the likelihood of there there are again two effects the main effect is the simpler a request the more help is given across situations but there's also main effect that for every request whether involving very low costs or higher costs the likelihood that people help is much lower the higher the number of people living in the area why is that the case why do people in rural areas are more helpful than people living in bit bigger cities there are basically two explanations one explanation is that people from rural settings are brought up to be more neighborly more likely also to trust others and particularly strangers mgrm the same Stanley m who uh uh who we discussed on The Obedience experiments he came up with the urban overload hypothesis this is the idea that people living in cities are likely to keep to themselves in order to avoid being overloaded overloaded by all the stimulation they receive anyway there is so much going on loudness um hectic uh Etc in cities that makes people stick TOs El and don't try to interact and particularly help strangers with strange resp requests so all of these slides show us that there are some personal components that there are some situational components uh and we can explain helping Behavior both from an biological um approach and from the social learning approach and now we turn to the bystander effect in more particular and as I said the Kitt genov murder stimulated This research on the bystander effect uh Lani and Dary are the two researchers who have picked up this uh and done uh some studies in the laboratory and in the field basically the bystander effect is the finding that the greater the number of bystanders people who are also around who witness the emergency the less likely it is that any one of them will help this is strange isn't it you would typically if you ask lay people when there are two people or when there are 20 people which makes it more likely that someone will help you would typically think that the more people are around this would increase the likelihood that someone would help but this is not the case and this has been shown over over and over and over again and again if you want to look it up on on YouTube bystand effect you will will find dozens of videos mostly real life videos somewhere in the field on the streets of bigger cities that confirm the bystander effect latan and Dary have done a number of studies and some studies are no Classics and famous studies in one study for example they invited people coming to the laboratory on the way to the room uh where the experiment should take place there was a um a technician climbing a ladder and saying hello to the the research participant somewhere in the middle of the letter then the participant was brought in the laboratory and was asked to wait for a few minutes before the experiment would start and either this research participant was waiting alone in this room or waiting with two other people who were Confederates of the experiment and then the door was closed and a minute later the participants heard noise and someone shouting in the corridor so they could assume that this person was F did fell down uh did fall down from the ladder when the participant was alone in the room there was almost 100% likelihood that this person got up opened the door and looked at the situation uh trying to find out whether they should help or not when there were two other people in the the room the likelihood was almost zero that the participant got up and did something when the other two participants also behaved uh uh this way in another experiment that Lani and Dal conducted the same procedure participant was invited uh into a laboratory uh were seated into a room and asked to wait a few minutes before the experiment would start and either they were waiting alone or were waiting with one or two Confederates of the experiment and then smoke came under the doorstep uh into this room when there was no participant no other participant or Confederate of the experiment like it was 100% that did this participant quickly got up and and opened the door and try to find out what needed to be done uh when there were other participants waiting and who did nothing and not doing anything the likelihood was Zero that within the first 5 minute the participant got up in some situations there was so much smoke in the room that the participant could not see the other Confederates anymore but still they didn't do anything and for me the most interesting study that uh Dar uh has conducted together with bson is a so-called Good Samaritan study participants were Seminary students so students who studied to become priests so very special specific group and they were asked to give a short sermon and before they did so they heard in a lecture theater like like this they heard about the Good Samaritan study the Good Samaritan is a famous story in the uh New Testament about someone helping someone else uh who no one else helped I think uh so they they listen to this story which should have increased the likelihood that they had the concept of helping is good somewhere in the back of their mind and it was Seminary students people who wanted to become priests and they listened to this uh this uh story and then they were told okay now you have to go to the next building for the next um next phase of of of the lecture or uh the program and half of them were told uh that they have to hurry up and half of them were told that they could take their time and so they they had to walk across the the college's campus and on the grass there was lying a man and the students in the situation when they were not in a hurry helped to 63% I I think this is this is a large number I still wonder what's with the other 37% why didn't they help in the condition when these Seminary students who had just listened to the Good Samaritan study uh story were asked to hurry up because time was running out and they should be there uh right in time for the lecture to start only 10% Healy stranger lying on the grass between two buildings and some students were even observed stepping over this man to be able to rush to the lecture theater so this shows that time pressure and this is a graph time pressure can make a big effect uh and make be taken uh as an excuse for not uh not helping and remember we discussed it um the uh experiment by duido and others who have uh conducted a similar experiment with a black Target lying on the ground and then they looked at uh uh how much help would white and other black people provide and the manipulation was that either there were some other Confederates around around or not and when others were around the black victim was given much less help by white participants than when there were no other helpers around so situations like time pressure or other people around May sometimes also um also help as um excuses for not giving help to people we for some reason don't like so latan and Daly from all these studies they have conducted and from the observations in the field uh developed a step-by-step description of how people decide whether to help in an emergency or not and this is called the bystander calculus model and it comprises five steps very simple first we have to notice the event if there's an emergency we have to pay attention we have to notice that someone something is going on sometimes we don't notice because we are in a hurry or because we look the other way or because we don't don't hear anything because we have our headphones on if we notice the event we have to interpret the event as an emergency okay we see that some men and women are discussing shouting at each other maybe it's Candid Camera maybe it's the way they always are I don't know you have to interpret the event as an emergency then you have to assume responsibility okay I've noticed it and I'm pretty sure it's an emergency but am I responsible should I do something am I the one who needs to to do something um if you think yes it's me I should do something then you have to know the appropriate form of assistance and if you imple and then you have to implement the decision to actually do it and in each of these stages uh people are prevented from helping and no help is given for a number of Reason reasons and the main most the three most widely discussed factors that have been studied in the experiments by latan and Daly are three factors first pluralistic ignorance so you have noticed that this that there is an event but you don't interpret it as an emergency because when others are standing around who don't look concerned or who don't do anything this greatly interferes with our interpretation of the event and emergency and therefore redu help and I think we should understand that this may happen in a in a split second So within a very few in few moments we decide whether it's an emergency or whether we should help or not and this is determined by what the others do in the first few seconds or moments and they may be in the same position than you are and if they don't help if no one helps within the first few seconds then you are already captured in this pluralistic ignorant uh thinking oh the others don't do anything so probably it's not so dramatic probably it's not an emergency in the first place in some situations obviously even if the others don't do anything you can't deny that this is an emergency you can't reject the idea that someone is in need of your help but then the others prevent you from assuming responsibility because responsibility is diffused across many more people diffusion of responsibility means each bystander sense of responsibility decreases as the number of witnesses increases so even if you interpret it as as an Emergen see the more people are around the less we are likely to help okay then there are situations when it's a clear emergency and you think you should do something and the final reason why less help is giving when many other people or some other people are standing around is audience inhibition okay it's an emergency I know I should do something but with the others looking and I may got it wrong and maybe I I'm last time I did a mouse to Mouse I uh I uh I was uh doing my driver's license so for the past 30 years I've never done it and maybe the others laugh at me uh and this further reduces the likelihood of help and I'll show you some um some examples uh in the little video in a moment so these are the three effects the bystand effect is very widespread you see it in the field we have experimental evidence and these three factors contribute to it pluralistic ignorance diffusion resp responsibility and audience inhibition now finally let's discuss briefly discuss individual differences is there such a thing as the altruistic personality research has found that the extent to which people are helpful in one situation is not highly related to how pro-social they are in other situations so this makes it unlikely that personality is the only or main determinant of whether people will help at least across situation but it does appear that some people are more likely to help in different kinds of situations so egly and Crowley have found that men are more likely to help in chalous heroic ways women women are more likely to help in nurturing ways involving long-term commitment and there are also some cultural differences across all cultures people tend to help their ingroup members more than they are likely to help their outgroup members and this effect is even higher in collectivistic cultures so in collectivistic cultures People Help the ingroup members even more than they would help strangers or members of groups that they are not members of what's the effect of mood on pro-social Behavior typically people who are in a good mood are more likely to help Good Moods can increase helping for three reasons Good Moods can make us interpret events in a sympathetic ways they help uh they help us prolong our good mood when we help then we are as we've seen earlier we relieved of distress and we make get approval by others and this increases our self-esteem and self-worth so it prolongs our good mood and good mood increase self attention and this can lead us to be more likely to behave according to our values and beliefs and typically our values and beliefs are pro-social and not antisocial um two examples from from our own research and then I stop and show you the the little video um in the first context I've done some research on social support and this is an example of research I have done with school teachers and here we had surveyed about 100 School teachers 105 School teachers about the social support they receive from their colleagues and I've split the the sample in uh in half so the dark bars are those who perceive low support and the light green bars are those who perceive High support and the dependent variables was physical symptoms uh so I asked them was eight statements about how often in the recent six months they suffered from neck and shoulder pains from uh back problems from uh perosis and these physical symptoms we asked them about retirement intentions at the time when we did this study this is some 10 years ago it was a big problem for many German federal states that many teachers go into retirement early many at the age of 55 56 and then the pension plans are uh getting into trouble because these teachers often are really seriously ill and suffer from burnout and depression but we ask them about How likely it is that you go into early retirement we ask them how many days have you been ill in the last school year and we asked them about organizational citizen ship Behavior this is a behavior that is helpful being helpful to others being Innovative making good suggestions to supervises helping prepare school events Etc and you see that on three out of these four variables we find significant effects so physical symptoms highly significant retirement intentions also significant ex absen is marginally significant uh in in the same direction the more support teachers receive they less likely they suffer physical symptoms they less likely they are to think about going into early retirement and the fewer days they are absent from school you see that that the average was something like uh 5 days but those who don't receive support by their colleagues report about six days in the last school years those who are well supported only 4 days so this is quite a strong uh difference and for OCB you see that there's a small tendency that those who receive support are also more likely to engage in OCB uh than those who don't receive support but this is not significantly different so so social support can help people living a better work life staying on until formal retirement being less ill and therefore report to work more often yes please no support or support measured in this experiment um this was just a cross-sectional survey study so we ask them about stress and illness and burnout and everything and we also ask them with a few items um how much support do you receive from your supervisors your colleagues or your students uh in emotional ways and how much practical support is offered to you by supervisors colleagues Etc when you have problems and this is only support by colleagues and in the other study I had a diploma student um anula Boon uh she surveyed about thousand school students uh average age was 13 14 years uh in in a school um and she presented situations problematic situations in which students were asked what would you do similar to the CES of floran metler so in the first situation there was a women uh from an ethnic minority uh who was ridiculed by some people at a bus stop in situation B there was a boy from an ethnic minorities who was molested by his peers in situation C there was a man in a wheelchair in situation d a homosexual couple and in situation e a homeless person all in some problematic situation at a bus stop or in the streets and um our idea originally was that we wanted to use some variables that we knew from the Prejudice research we were doing at that time so how much contact do you have to people from ethnic minorities to what extent do you feel that differences in uh societal hierarchies are Justified social dominance orientation remember we discussed this in the session on Prejudice and Intergroup Behavior we asked them about Prejudice more directly we asked them about um uh some items about the victim and our original hypothesis was that people who are more prejudiced may help in these situations but not in situations where ethnic minorities are involved and people who have more contact and less social dominance orientation should also be more likely to help in these situations but it should not relate to the other situations what you see here is that people who have contact to ethnic minority group members are more likely to help in all situations people who have a lower social dominance orientation are more likely to help in all situations and this confirms the research that I have briefly mentioned where I showed you the graph about the last 10 years uh on Prejudice and racism Etc uh this supports the idea of hyp meire and his colleagues in in the group related en enmity study Prejudice seems to be part of a syndrome if I'm prejudiced towards ethnic minority people people from ethnic minorities I also am more likely to be Prejudice about handicapped people homosexual people homeless people the unemployed etc etc what we also found what we also found was confirmation of bson theory those children who more who felt more empathy and we used a standard empathy scale to measure this were also more likely to help in all of these situations yes please social dominance orientation so um I think I mentioned this in the lecture on on um Intergroup Behavior or preice uh there are two explanations uh for uh discrimination and prejudice against ethnic minority group members that come from the same area and the old traditional construct is authoritarianism so people who strongly believe in authorities who support authorities who stick to rules and norms and exclude those who are not sticking to the rules and Norms are called aarian people this was researched by adoro and uh more recently by almaya and yes there are links to Prejudice social dominance orientation is a more modern concept that says some people are more likely to accept that there are differences in societal hierarchies it's good that some people earn more money and have more power than others and people who are more social dominant oriented are also more likely to have Prejudice and discriminated okay as I said I will show you the little [Music] video