Altruism – selflessly helping someone, with no reward, the performance of pro-social actions without expectation of benefit for oneself.
Pro-social behaviour – any behaviour that is intended to benefit others Altruistic motivation – do it to help the other person Egoistic motivation – do it to make yourself feel good Intrinsic reward – being made to feel good as reward, involves engaging in a behaviour because it is personally rewarding. Extrinsic reward – receiving material reward. Occurs when we are motivated to perform a behaviour or engage in an activity to get a reward or avoid punishment.
Cost benefit analysis Costs of helping:
Time consuming
You may get hurt
May get it wrong, might make it worse
May be involved in legal procedures
May be seen as the offender
Costs of not helping:
Feeling guilty
Girl could die
Benefits of helping:
Intrinsic rewards
Extrinsic rewards
Benefits of not helping:
Not involved
Saves time and energy
Less chance of being embarrassed
Theory 1: Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
A person is perceived to be in need – their current state is mismatched from their potential state in terms of mood, pain, hunger or safety
The potential helper conducts a cost-benefit analysis
The potential helper feels empathy for the person in need
Batson 1991
Summarise: we feel empathy, we help
Supporting Studies: Toi and Batson (1982) Batson et al. (1983)
We help people because we are related to them: Average percentage of helping:
Monozygotic twins 100%
Parents 50%
Sibling average 50%
Grandparents 25%
How does the theory explain helping family? They share our genes, by helping them our genes are then passed down.
How does the theory explain helping people we know that we are not related to? You expect them to reciprocate, reciprocal altruism, we expect them to help us in the future to give our genes better chance of survival.
How does the theory explain helping people that we will never see again or know? It's something we haven't evolved from, we have been ingrained to help family, but we have misfired when it comes to strangers. We have scaled up animal instincts, creating a helpful society.
How does the Veneer theory link to Kin Selection? Artificial cover, helpful behaviour displayed is hiding the selfish people we really are, destructive instincts. We cover it because of social reasons to make a good impression on people.
Strengths of KS:
Can be seen in real-life, e.g. reports on fire evacuations show people are much more likely to stay together if with family and not friends
Weaknesses of KS:
Flaws in the theory – many people help others that can’t aid survival, e.g. give money to charity, however Dawkins explained this as a misfiring of altruism, a leftover behaviour from when societies were so small everyone knew each other
Reductionist as focuses only on nature
Deterministic as doesn’t allow for human freewill to choose who to help and when to help
Etic so ignores cultural differences in altruism shown in Madsen et al .study