The Effect of Personal Characteristics on Prosocial Behaviour

The two articles that will be examined for this paper is, Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written in our Genes and Only the Fair Deserve the Grape. These articles explore the ideas of morality and reciprocity and gives ideas into whether or not they combine. They offer similar views of why people help one another.

In the 1960’s psychologist Stanley Milgram set up what could be deemed as a controversial set of experiments. His goal was to see if he could determine how ordinary German citizens could have been a part of such atrocities committed against the Jewish people in World War II. Milgram also wondered if something like that could still take place in our modern society. The true motives of the experiment were not revealed to the participants until after the experiment was concluded (Stangor, Jhangiani, Tarry, 2014). The participants were recruited from the general-public. They were told the experiment was to determine how punishment influences learning and that they would be paid four dollars for participating in the experiment.

1. John Darley and Bibb Latané were interested in prosocial behavior, or behavior that produces positive social consequences, and they examined factors that contributed to the decision to assist in an emergency situation. They termed the behavior of helping others “bystander intervention.”

I agree with Deigh in that they are different types of helping. I also think that it was a selfish motive to help an old lady across the street for praise from others. I liked how you said “I believe that a helping behavior that is done from happiness holds more contentment because it is a genuine feeling rather than a temporary satisfaction from praise for the help given” very

Philip G. Zimbardo, a social psychologist, presented a classic psychology research in the situational effects on human behaviour. This explains how situations can modify an individual to act in ways they would not have acted before. Zimbardo highlights that a person are seduced into evil by dehumanising and labelling others; and notes that an individual who has a sense of anonymity increases their aggression, such as wearing a uniform or a mask. The Stanford prison experiment, which Zimbardo conducted, showed that institutional forces and the peer pressures amongst volunteered guards to disregard the potential harm of their actions on to the volunteered prisoners. In other words, a person does not need a motive, and what is needed is a situation that facilitates through the lines between good and evil (Dittmann, 2004).

What determines how one behaves? Is it character, situation, both, or neither? In a series of experiments conducted from 1960 to 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram sought to examine the relationship between obedience and authority, in order to examine justifications offered by Nazis for genocide during WWII. While there are several interpretations of Milgram’s results, philosopher Ruwen Ogien uses the results as grounds for criticizing virtue ethics as a moral theory. In doing so, Ogien suggests that “what determines behavior is not character but other factors tied to situation” (Ogien 120). The purpose of this essay is to articulate why I am not persuaded by Ogien’s use of the Milgram experiments to critique virtue ethics.

Additionally, being exposed to someone else’s pro-social behaviour influences our own as well. Seeing someone else do something good for someone has been shown to increase pro-social behaviour in others. That person is perceived as a role-model for pro-social behaviour in the eyes of others. This, however, does not mean that pro-social behaviour will be influenced in all people, as each individual behaves differently. One individual may look at a pro-social act and think it is good that someone intervened and move on; another may look at it and learn from it in hopes of implementing it into their lives in the future.

“The Bystander effect” is the psychological occurrence that is related to the social intervention among people. It is filled with anecdotes of people of who stood back when help is needed, preferring to wait for someone else to act. According to author, the probability of accepting help decreases with an increment in the quantity of spectators. There are different causes of the bystander effect and these causes only depends on the perception of the individual and the way people take up the situation. Most common causes are diffusion of responsibility, symbolic interactionism and fear of becoming target or getting indulged in criminal case.

The inability to find personality traits which allow one to determine who would and would not possess helping behaviors has left psychologists puzzled for several years. Not being able to find a correlational set of variables good enough to detect helping behavior during emergencies has left researchers searching to find other indicators that could be used to find the likelihood of someone helping others in a situation. Researchers of this study used the story of The Good Samaritan to test variables to see if they could find a predictor for helping behavior.

Dr. Julian Savulescu argues the origins and rationale of human moral behavior. Dr. Savulescu begins his argument with the history of human behavior, how, when competing for resources, it was much easier to kill one another than to trust. Despite the overall distrust people had for each other, humans have always been protective of their family members and close friends. That’s when Dr. Julian Savulescu mentions that humans are also more prone to empathizing with single individuals rather than groups. People want to help, but as the number of the individuals who need help increases, trust decreases.

we argue that ethical behavior was fitness-enhancing in the years marking the emergence of Homo sapiens because human groups with many altruists fared better than groups of selfish individuals, and the fitness losses sustained by altruists were more than compensated by the superior performance of the groups in which they congregated (Gintis, Henrich, Bowles, Boyd, Fehr 1).

The theoretical question that has been posed in this article is whether prosocial private self-schemas and prosocial private self-awareness are predictors of prosocial behavior. The self-schema is believed to play an important role in the regulation of behavior. It is believed that behavior is influenced by the activation of a schema. This schema is connected to the perception of self. Little evidence is shown to conclude that self-schemas are independently influencing any type of behavior and it is presumed that both the descriptive information about the self and the behavioral information are stored independently of each other. This would infer that the linkages that are between the

In this paper I will argue that selecting only one form of egoism is not enough to explain human motives and that it takes a mix of several theories to explain it, specifically a mix of ethical egoism and altruism, with the side note that intent is not important in this situation. The mix is important, as any one theory seemingly fails to encapsulate the scope of human interactions. Pure ethical egoism, the idea that each person should only try to help themselves, makes people out to be too greedy and seemingly unwilling to help anyone at any point in their lives. Pure altruism, the idea that people should use their abilities and advantages to exclusively help others, makes people too willing to sacrifice what they have for someone else. If people were completely altruistic nothing would ever be accomplished and eventually those advantages would become erased as people stop working to better themselves. I also believe that the intent of the action is not important so the morality of the action should be directly tied to the outcome, not the thought process of the person doing the action. All of these ideas will be explained in more detail later in the paper. This paper will look at each of these three factors individually, show why they are insufficient for explaining human motives on their own and then explain how they can all work in conjunction to better explain human motives. This paper will then go on to show how someone might disagree with this thesis by providing some

John Edlund, Brad Sagarin, and Brian Johnson are three researchers at Northern Illinois University whom were interested in studying reciprocity. Reciprocity is an important social norm in relationships and exists in some form in every society. The article begins with some examples of reciprocity all over world, such in the 1960s and 70s with the Hare Krishnas. The members of the temple gave small gifts to travelers such as a flower, in order to receive a donation. Or another study in 1971 that was conducted in a laboratory and performed by a researcher named Reagan. This study discovered that reciprocity does not need to be returned in the same manner that it was given. Even with all these examples of situation constraints, the researchers found no reports on the individual differences in reciprocity. Therefore, they decided to investigate one potential moderator in a reciprocity relationship which was a belief in a just world.

In Bowles & Gintis (2013) , the authors described that for thousands of years cooperation has been an essential element in human survival. The authors believe that humans as moral being care about ethical values and some social emotions such as shame and guilt have also been evolved. Therefore, humans are now more likely to internalized social norms so that they act ethically based on their own personal beliefs not because they want to avoid the social punishment.