Understanding Helping Behavior

The Piliavin`s model is less complex and for me more efficient. The person see the event, has physical arousal, make a straight analyse if the costs outweigh the benefits and decide if will help or not. I think that all this happen in the fifth stage of Latane and Darley`s model, so i don`t find their model very efficient.

I think people help others for various reasons: people intend to help easily if the victim is their relative, the same colour, the same background, etc. This is called the Kind selection. People help with the interest of gaining something in exchange: Social exchange theory. And finally people also help if they believe that the victim would do the same for them: Reciprocity norm.

The benefits of helping behaviour can be: Increase probability that someone will help us in the future, relieve the personal stress, gain social approval and increase self esteem.

The costs of helping can be: Loosing time, risk of danger for the bystander, risk of failure, financial loss, unwanted involvement with others and distress.

To understand helping behaviour i studied Piliavin`s subway experiment; This is a field experiment done in 1969 in the New York subway trains in various journeys between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. during a period of two months. The victims were pretending to be drunk or ill; they were four victims, three white and one black, there were four teams of four researchers with females included and the females recorded the reactions and in some experiments the victim would also carries a cane. As soon as the train started the victim would collapse and wait for some help, if no one offered help he stayed in the floor until the model helped him on his feet and then off the train at the first stop. All the team would leave the train and repeat the procedure on the next train; they would do the same thing about six to eight times a day.

The results amazed the experimenters because they were waiting for less help then they had towards the victim, they also found out that the males were far more likely to help than the females and there was a little tendency to help the victim of the same race but in the drunken condition.

So from this experiment and from what i studied before about helping behaviour i understand that the most part of people (almost the generality) intend to help because of emotional arousal (empathy, being close to the emergency and the length of time the emergency continues) and its reduction (by helping, going to help, leaving the scene and believing that the victim does not deserve help), as well as the costs and rewards of helping or not helping. E.g. the costs of helping might be embarrassment or physical harm. The costs of not helping might be self blame or censure from others. The rewards of helping might be praise and the rewards of not helping would be not getting on in the other peoples business.

The relation between morality and helping behaviour i think is enormous, the mood and altruism in my point of view also influences the decision of helping, the responsibility towards the victim is another aspect of influence in the helping behaviour, e.g. if we are alone or is more people around the importance of the physical connection (community, collectivism, dependency and social identity) is higher.

Anyway in spite of all this studies i think that all depends of our degree of humanity. I agree with all this studies and i find them very important for the knowledge of the human nature and the human behaviour but also all depends on the person.