Understanding Helping Behavior

Image via Wikipedia

Helping behaviour. (Help motivated by the desire to reduce our own suffering.)

The studies made on helping behaviour are to try to understand a fundamental characteristic of the human nature. The Philosophers tried to debate whether humans actually intend to help others without interest or if they help with some interest, encouraged by the rules of society or because of some other motives.

Two Psychologists, Latane and Darley have developed a five-stage model of helping behaviour (1970), which consists in:

1. Noticing the situation

This is when one must first perceive a potential problem or because he sees something unusual: listen more noise, etc.

2. Interpreting the event as an emergency

I think people often rely on the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to make decisions about how they should interpret the same situation. For example: In the Eastern Counties if a man is being violent towards his wife, no one would help her because their culture says that the man has the right to be violent with the wife, on the other way in the Western Countries this is against the law, so we can call the police.

3. Assuming responsibility

This is when the person decide if will help or not. In Darley and Latane`s study “Seizure” they found that the highest percentage of the participants helped when they where alone. In my idea this happened probably because when we are alone we feel more responsible for the others and if there is more people around we intend to think that someone will help because they are also responsible or people think that someone already arranged some help. I also think that if we feel responsible we intend to help more.

4. Deciding how to help

I think that this stage depends a bit of our personality, our physical arousal, if we know the victim or not and of stage 3. (Assuming responsability)

5. Deciding to help and how best to assist

At this stage the person already decided if is going to help or not and start weighting the costs and the benefits to the other person and to herself. Ex: The person might fear embarrassment, danger to herself and the other person, loss of some valued resource (time, money) and having to experience a painful and stressing situation. I think that this stage is the most important of all the five because the person might not help the victim and the victim might suffer a great damage or even this can be fatal as in the situation of Kitty Genovese which been stabbed to death over a period of 30 minutes in front of 38 irresponsive witnesses in a New York street in 1964, which sparked the research into the behaviour of bystanders.