Social Psychology Prosocial Behavior, as the Name

Social Psychology

Prosocial behavior, as the name suggests, is behavior that is ultimately beneficial to others. Any act that is carried out with an end to helping someone else instead of oneself is prosocial behavior. If the behavior involves no gain to the individual, and in fact, may involve a personal cost, this behavior is considered altruistic. There is some debate over whether true altruism exists, or if even seemingly unselfish behavior is really motivated by a desire to impress, or feel good about oneself.

The motivations for an individual's behavior are complex and varied. After the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in the 1960s, researchers became very interested in the effect of bystanders on the willingness of a person to offer aid. Genovese's murder was witnessed by 38 individuals and not one even phoned the police.

Research carried out by Latane and Darley in 1970 elucidated the so-called "bystander effect," where they discovered that people are actually less inclined to offer assistance the more bystanders there are. Latane and Darley (Aronson et al., 2002) identified five steps that were critical to the decision to offer assistance. Firstly, a person must notice the event and interpret it as an emergency. They then must assume responsibility, have the knowledge of how to assist and finally, the individual must implement the decision. If any of these steps does not occur, the person will not offer assistance.

In an emergency situation such as a mugging, Latane and Darley's research found that you would be better off, the fewer the number of bystanders. In interpreting an event as an emergency, the presence of other bystanders who are not reacting, dissuades an individual from perceiving the event as an emergency ("pluralistic ignorance"). Furthermore, a bystander is more inclined to accept responsibility for the person in distress if there are few other witnesses to the event.

Aggression is another term used by social psychologists to denote a deliberate behavior that the person intends to inflict either physical or psychological pain. A variety of theories have evolved to explain the phenomenon of aggression in our society. Many view the foundation of aggression research to be Bandura's examinations of observational learning with children who learned aggressive behavior towards a doll. Aggression research is particularly relevant in a time with so much media violence, on television, video games and movies.

Cognitive neoassociation theory is one way that aggression may be viewed. This theory is usually attributed to research done by Leonard Berkowitz and is called a "priming effects perspective" (Brennan, 2002). This theory posits that an individual's exposure to a certain stimuli may activate related thoughts or feelings. The person is thus "primed" by the exposure. The individual's associations between that "priming" aggressive stimuli and other thoughts or memories may then predispose the person to act aggressively. "Watching a violent film can 'prime' hostile or aggressive thoughts...these hostile thoughts may automatically trigger in the viewer other hostile thoughts, feelings and possibly even behavioral action tendencies." (Brennan, 2002).

The prevalence of aggression in society is supported by studies done on cognitive neoassociation. Research done with undergraduates primed with violent movies demonstrated their tendency to then act more aggressively compared to an unprimed control group. The implications of this theory are important when one considers the ongoing debate into media violence.

Like the "bystander effect" discussed above, "social loafing" is another instance where the presence of others may influence an individual's behavior. In this case, social loafing refers to an examination of how people behave in a group. When results are being judged from a group as a whole, does this in any way affect an individual's performance? Researchers have found that a person's efforts are diminished when they believe they are contributing to a group's performance, as opposed to an individual evaluation. (Although, on more difficult tasks, the presence of others has a relaxing effect and allows the individual to actually perform better.) This process is known as social loafing; "the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable." (Myers, 2001).

Social loafing might occur, for example, in a university course where students are required to do group work. If the individual contributions are communally pooled there may be a tendency for certain students to put forth less of an effort than if the individual work was being evaluated.

Social loafing commonly occurs when people feel less individually accountable. Additionally, when a person doesn't view his or her individual contribution as important there can be a tendency to rely on the input of others.

A strategy to reduce social loafing would be to increase individual accountability. For example, if individuals submitting group work were given an individual grade instead of one grade for the group, then each student would feel more personally accountable. Similarly, if more individual recognition was given for work contributed as part of a group, then each participant wouldn't feel so dispensable, and social loafing would be decreased.