Altruism
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Altruism is the behavior of placing others before oneself. Humans have a unique capacity for altruism that anthropological game theory experiments have found replicable across all cultures (E Fehr, U Fischbacher - Nature, 2003). Wikipedia has a good historical article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism, but this article will focus more on research that has gone on in psychology concerning Altruism.
Contents |
Individual Differences
Genetics
A twin study (| Rushton et. al (1986)) found that the correlation between altruism in monozygotic twins was .53 and for dizygotic twins, it was .25, indicating that perhaps 50% of the variance in altruism can be accounted for by heredity. In this study, older people and women were also found to be more altruistic, as measured by the Self Report Altruism Scale.
Sex Differences
From | Andreoni and Vesterlund 2001 -> We study gender differences in altruism by examining a modified dictator game with varying incomes and prices. Our results indicate that the question 'which is the fair sex?' has a complicated answer—when altruism is expensive, women are kinder, but when it is cheap, men are more altruistic. That is, we find that the male and female "demand curves for altruism" cross, and that men are more responsive to price changes. Furthermore, men are more likely to be either perfectly selfish or perfectly selfless, whereas women tend to be "equalitarians" who prefer to share evenly.
Situations
The Bystander Effect
The bystander effect is the phenomenon whereby a large number of observers DECREASES the chances of a person getting aid, made famous by the case of Kitty Genovese, who was attacked and killed over a long period of time as 38 neighbors failed to come to her aid. See the wikipedia article for more -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
Propelled by this incident, Bibb Latane and John Darley conducted a series of experiments in which subjects were placed in situations where they had the opportunity to help others. In one experiment, subjects were told they were participating in a discussion about college life that would take place over an intercom to preserve privacy. The discussion was pre-recorded, however, and halfway through, a tape of one participant having an epileptic attack was played. The amount of time it took for the subject to help - in this case by leaving their cubicle and going to an assistant sitting down the hall - was measured. Some subjects were led to believe they were the only person besides the victim participating in the discussion exercise. Others believed there were as many as six other subjects. All subjects that were led to believe they were the only participant helped within six minutes, but only 62% of those who believed they were in a large group helped. Those who believed they were alone also acted more quickly, with 85% helping within a minute of the epileptic attack starting, and only 31% of those who believed they were in a large group acting within that time. Latane and Darley called this effect 'diffusion of responsibility'. There was no significant effect of subjects' socioeconomic status, gender, or measures of Machiavellianism, authoritarianism or social responsibility. These results suggested that altruistic behavior was greatly influenced by the situation, instead of the individual Latane & Darley, 1968.
Numerous other experiments have replicated these results in a variety of settings, from studies that find that members of small, rural churches engage in more charitable activities (Weeks, G.C. (1995). Prosocial behavior as a function of religious settings and religiosity, Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 56(3-B), 1749) to a recent study which found that identical email requests for help that were addressed to a single recipient received more responses, and longer average responses, than emails addressed to multiple recipients Barron&Yechiam, 2002. The results have also been extended to other paradigms. For instance, people subliminally primed with the idea of being in a group pledged fewer dollars to a charity Garcia, Weaver & Moskowitz, 2002.
Altruism in getting online contributions
In this article | Beenen et al. 2004, experiments are done to determine what motivates people to contribute to online communities. It is found that uniqueness, challenge, and specificity increase contributions.
Emotions and Altruism
Empathy
Empathy increases altruism (ie. RB Cialdini, SL Brown, BP Lewis, C Luce 1987) as measured by the behavioral intention to willingness to help a person in distress. Some people (ie. Batson) argue that altruism by empathy is selfless while others (ie. Cialdini) have argued that empathy increases helping because the other person is more a part of oneself.
Arousal Reduction/Personal Distress Hypothesis
Several researchers have suggested that some altruistic behaviors have egoistic motivations, such as the desire to gain rewards such as praise and self-satisfaction, or the desire to avoid punishments such as condemnation and self-censure. One of the most frequently studied "egoistic" motivations is the desire to alleviate personal distress, which C. Daniel Batson describes as "an internal state of aversive arousal or tension caused by witnessing someone suffer" (p. 42, The Altruism Question). Batson attempted to test the arousal-reduction hypothesis against the empathy-altruism hypothesis by creating a helping situation with "high escape" and "low escape" conditions. Subjects were asked to take the place of another subject (secretly a confederate) who claimed to be highly sensitive to otherwise mild electric shocks being used in a task. In the high escape condition, subjects were told that they could leave at any time, while in the low escape condition they were told they would have to watch the confederate suffer through eight more trials. Subjects were also given questionnaires assessing whether they felt emotions more in line with empathy ('warmth', 'sensitivity') or personal distress ('uneasiness', 'discomfort'). Subjects who reported high amounts of empathy agreed to switch places in both difficult escape (82%) and easy escape (91%) conditions. Subjects who had a low amount of empathic concern and high personal distress were much less likely to help in the easy escape (18%) as opposed to the difficult escape (64%) condition.
Nancy Eisenberg criticized Batson's work as applying only to state-related responses. They "do not deal with the relation between dispositional empathy (or sympathy and personal distress) and either dispositional prosocial behavior or prosocial behavior in different contexts" (p. 39, Eisenberg & Fabes, 1991). She argued that people's dispositions can mediate the interaction between their emotional response and their behavior in a given situation. Personality characteristics such as sociability, social responsibility, or other-orientedness might actually be the determining influence on behavior when the situation does not evoke an emotional response. She cites Snyder and Ickes (1985), who proposed that in psychologically "strong" situations, which provide salient cues for behavior, situational variables will most predict behavior. In psychologically "weak" situations, on the other hand, dispositional variables will play the largest role. Even in psychologically strong situations where empathy is invoked, if the cues are enough to elicit sympathy in most people (for example, coming across a small child alone and injured), disposition rather than situation may play the deciding role.
A 1989 study by Eisenberg et al. compared facial expressions and self-reports of empathy versus personal distress with prosocial behavior observed in peer interactions. Although self-reports were not correlated with behavior (perhaps due to the participants' youthfulness), sad/concerned facial expressions were associated with spontaneous prosocial behavior, whereas anxious reactions were associated with requested prosocial behaviors, which might be considered a "low escape" condition. A third study (Holmgren et al, 1998) specifically compared ratings of dispositional prosocial behavior by peers, parents and teachers to facial, heart rate, and skin conductance reactions to video of a burn victim. They found that skin reactivity, a sign of arousal and therefore assumed to be a personal distress reaction, was negatively correlated with dispositional helping, as were facial distress reactions, whereas there was a positive correlation between sad facial reactions and dispositional helping.
References:
1. Batson, C. Daniel (1991). The Altruism Question. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
2. Eisenberg, N & Fabes, R.A. (1991) In M.S. Clark (Ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology: Vol. 12. Prosocial Behavior. (34-61) Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
3. Snyder, M. & Ickes, W. (1985). Personality and social behavior. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology, 883-948. New York: Random House.
4. Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R.A., Miller, P.A., Fultz, J., Shell, R., Mathy, R.M. & Ray, R.R. (1989). Relation of sympathy and personal distress to prosocial behavior: a multimethod study, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(1), 55-66.
5. Holmgren, R.A., Eisenberg, N. & Fabes, R.A. (1998). The relations of children’s situational empathy-related emotions to dispositional prosocial behavior, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22(1), 169-193.
