Chapter 13 Prosocial behaviour

Acts that are positively valued by society. 

Acts that intentionally benefit someone else. 

A special form of helping behaviour, sometimes costly, that shows concern for fellow human beings and is performed without expactations of personal gain. 

Classic debate about whether genetic or environmental factors determine human behaviour. Scientists generally accept that it is an interaction of both. 

An extension of evolutionary psychology that views complex social behaviour as adaptive, helping the individual, kin and the species as a whole to survive. 

Ability to feel another person's experiences; identifying with and experiencing another person's emotions, thoughts and attitudes. 

In attending to an emergency, the bystander calculates the perceived costs and benefits of providing help compared with those associated with not helping.

Piliavin's view that failing to help causes distress to a bystander who empathises with a victim's plight. 

Piliavin's view that not helping a victim in distress can be costly to a bystander. 

An element in Batson's theory of helping beahaviour. In contrast to personal distress, it includes feelings of warmth, being soft-hearted and having compassion for a person in need. 

Tendency for a person to reproduce the actions, attitudes and emotional responses exhibited by a real-lide or symbolic model. Also called observational learning. 

The view championed by Bandura that human social behaviour is not innate but learnt from appropriate models. 

Acquiring a behaviour after observing that other person was rewarded for it.

According to Lerner and Miller, people need to belive that the world is a just place where they get what they deserve. As evidence of undeserved suffering undermines this belief, people may conclude that victims deserve their fate. 

This occurs when an individual breaks out of the role of a bystander and helps another person in an emergency. 

People are less likely to help in an emergency when they are with others than when alone. The greater the number, the less likely it is that anyone will help. 

Often involves an unusal event, can vary in nature, is unplanned and requires a quick response. 

Tendency of an individual to assume that others will take responsibility. This is a hypothesised cause of the bystander effect.

The dread of acting inappropriately or of making a foolish mistake witnessed by others. The desire to avoid ridicule inhibits effective responses to an emergency by members of a group. 

Descriptions of the nature of people's close relationships, thought to be established in childhood. 

The notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death. Self-esteem may be centrally implicated in effective terror management. 

Psychological gender differences are determined by individuals' adaptations to restrictions based on their hender in their society. Also called social role theory. 

An individual's agreement in advance to be responsible if trouble occurs: for example, committing oneself to protect the property of another person against theft. 

People who know and care about us and who can provide back-up during a time of stress. 

Attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that define group membership and differentiate between groups. 

This is sometimes called the reciprocity norm, or 'the law of doing unto others what they do to you'. It can refer to an attempt to gain compliance by first doing someone a favour, or to mutual aggression, or to mutual attraction. 

The idea that we should help people who are dependent and in need. It is contradicted by another norm that discourages interfering in other people's lives. 

Social dilemma in which cooperation by all benefits all, but competition by all harms all.