INTERPERSONAL BEHAVIOUR
BEING IN THE PRESENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE
Social facilitation
Intuitively, most of us probably think the term ‘social’ means doing things with (or being in the presence of ) other people, and that social psychology is therefore about the causes and effects of this ‘social presence’. Although social sychologists use the term ‘social’ in a much broader way than this, the effect of the physical presence of other people on our behaviour remains an important research question (Guerin, 1993). In fact, in 1898 Triplett designed one of the earliest social psychology experiments to address this very question. He discovered from analysis of published records that cyclists go faster when paced by another cyclist, and he decided to investigate this phenomenon under more controlled conditions. Triplett had 40 children reel in fishing lines, either alone or in pairs, and he discovered that the children tended to perform the task more quickly when in the presence of someone else doing the same task. Triplett attributed this ‘quickening effect’ to the arousal of a competitive instinct.
Some years later, F. Allport (1920) coined the term social facilitation to refer to a more clearly defined effect in which the mere presence of conspecifics (i.e. members of the same species) would improve individual task performance. These conspecifics might be co-actors (i.e. doing the same task but not interacting) or simply a passive audience (i.e. observing the task performance).
Research (much of it with an exotic array of different species) seemed to confirm this. We now know that cockroaches run faster, chickens, fish and rats eat more, and pairs of rats copulate more when being ‘watched’ by members of their own species (see Zajonc, Heingartner & Herman, 1969). However, later research found that the presence of conspecifics sometimes impairs performance, although it was often unclear what degree of social presence produced impairment (i.e. coaction or a passive audience).
Zajonc (1965) put forward a drive theory to explain social facilitation effects. He argued that, because people are unpredictable, the mere presence of a passive audience instinctively and automatically produces increased arousal and motivation. This was proposed to act as a drive that produces dominant responses for that situation (i.e. well learned, instinctive or habitual behaviours that take precedence over alternative responses under conditions of heightened arousal or motivation). But do dominant responses improve task performance? Zajonc argued that if the dominant response is the correct behaviour for that situation (e.g. pedalling when we get on a bicycle), then social presence improves performance (social facilitation). But if the dominant response is anincorrect behaviour (e.g. trying to write notes in a lecture before we have understood properly what is being said), then social presence can impair performance (social inhibition) and Markus, 1978).
Zajonc believed that drive was an innate reaction to the mere presence of others. Other views are that drive results from an acquired apprehension about being evaluated by others (Cottrell, 1972) or from conflict between paying attention to a task and to an audience (e.g. Sanders, 1981). Still other researchers discard the notion of drive entirely. They suggest that social facilitation may occur because of distraction and subsequent narrowing of attention, which hinders performance of poorly learned or difficult tasks but leaves unaffected or improves performance of well learned or easy tasks (Baron, 1986; Manstead & Semin, 1980).
Alternatively, social presence might motivate concern with self-presentation – i.e. how we appear to others (rather than concern specifically about being evaluated by them) (Bond, 1982) or make us more self-aware (Wicklund, 1975). This might then increase cognitive effort, which is considered to improve performance on easy tasks but not on difficult tasks (where failure and social embarrassment might be anticipated). Overall, then, the empirical finding from this body of research is that the presence of others improves performance on easy tasks, but impairs performance on difficult tasks (see Bond & Titus, 1983). But no single explanation seems to account for social facilitation and social inhibition effects (Guerin, 1993). Instead, several concepts – including arousal, evaluation apprehension, and distraction conflict – are involved. Bystander apathy and intervention. One type of behaviour that might be affected by the presence of other people is our inclination to offer help to someone who needs it. This question can be studied from many perspectives. One of these is evolutionary psychology – do people help others simply as members of their own species, or only those with whom they shares genes? (see Batson, 1983; and Dawkins’, 1976, notion of the ‘selfish gene’). Another perspective is that of socialization – do we learn to help others as a result of direct instructions, reinforcement, social learning and modelling (see Bandura, 1973)? Two of the most important lines of research on helping by social psychologists have focused on situational factors thatencourage or discourage helping, and on what motives may underlie helping others.
A critical feature of the immediate situation that determines whether by standers help someone who is in need of help (bystander intervention) is the number of potential helpers who are present. This approach was stimulated by the widely reported murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964: although 38 people admitted witnessing the murder, not a single person ran to her aid. To explain bystander intervention (or its opposite – apathy), Darley, Latané and others carried out a series of classic experiments (Darley & Batson, 1973; Darley & Latané, 1968; Latané & Rodin, 1969). Numerous studies indicate that the willingness to intervene in emergencies is higher when a bystander is alone (Latané & Nida, 1981). In one of the first experiments showing this effect (Latané & Rodin, 1969), students overheard that a woman working in theoffice next door had climbed onto a chair, fallen on the loor and lay moaning in pain. This incident lasted 130 seconds. In one condition, the student who overheard the information was alone. In a second condition, another student (a confederate of the experimenter, who had been instructed to be passive) was also present.
In a third condition, the student participant was with a stranger at the time of the accident, and in a fourth condition the student participant was with a friend. Although two people could have intervened in the third and fourth conditions, in only 40 per cent of stranger dyads and 70 per cent of friend dyads did at least one student intervene. The individual likelihood of intervention has to be calculated according to a special formula that corrects for the fact that two people are free to act in two conditions (with stranger; with friend), but only one person is free to act in the remaining two conditions (with passive confederate; alone). The individual likelihood of intervention was in fact twice as high when students were with a friend (i.e. fourth condition) compared with a stranger (i.e. third condition). Both of these corrected intervention rates for the third and fourth conditions were lower than in the condition where the participant was alone (first condition), but higher than in the second condition, where there was a passive confederate present at the time of the accident.
Subsequent research indicated that three types of social process seem to cause the social inhibition of helping in such situations:
1. diffusion of responsibility (when others are present, our own perceived responsibility is lowered);
2. ignorance about how others interpret the event; and
3. feelings of unease about how our own behaviour will be evaluated by others present.
So, witnesses to the Kitty Genovese murder may have failed to intervene because:
1. they saw other people present, and so did not feel responsible;
BEING IN THE PRESENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE
Social facilitation
Intuitively, most of us probably think the term ‘social’ means doing things with (or being in the presence of ) other people, and that social psychology is therefore about the causes and effects of this ‘social presence’. Although social sychologists use the term ‘social’ in a much broader way than this, the effect of the physical presence of other people on our behaviour remains an important research question (Guerin, 1993). In fact, in 1898 Triplett designed one of the earliest social psychology experiments to address this very question. He discovered from analysis of published records that cyclists go faster when paced by another cyclist, and he decided to investigate this phenomenon under more controlled conditions. Triplett had 40 children reel in fishing lines, either alone or in pairs, and he discovered that the children tended to perform the task more quickly when in the presence of someone else doing the same task. Triplett attributed this ‘quickening effect’ to the arousal of a competitive instinct.
Some years later, F. Allport (1920) coined the term social facilitation to refer to a more clearly defined effect in which the mere presence of conspecifics (i.e. members of the same species) would improve individual task performance. These conspecifics might be co-actors (i.e. doing the same task but not interacting) or simply a passive audience (i.e. observing the task performance).
Research (much of it with an exotic array of different species) seemed to confirm this. We now know that cockroaches run faster, chickens, fish and rats eat more, and pairs of rats copulate more when being ‘watched’ by members of their own species (see Zajonc, Heingartner & Herman, 1969). However, later research found that the presence of conspecifics sometimes impairs performance, although it was often unclear what degree of social presence produced impairment (i.e. coaction or a passive audience).
Zajonc (1965) put forward a drive theory to explain social facilitation effects. He argued that, because people are unpredictable, the mere presence of a passive audience instinctively and automatically produces increased arousal and motivation. This was proposed to act as a drive that produces dominant responses for that situation (i.e. well learned, instinctive or habitual behaviours that take precedence over alternative responses under conditions of heightened arousal or motivation). But do dominant responses improve task performance? Zajonc argued that if the dominant response is the correct behaviour for that situation (e.g. pedalling when we get on a bicycle), then social presence improves performance (social facilitation). But if the dominant response is anincorrect behaviour (e.g. trying to write notes in a lecture before we have understood properly what is being said), then social presence can impair performance (social inhibition) and Markus, 1978).
Zajonc believed that drive was an innate reaction to the mere presence of others. Other views are that drive results from an acquired apprehension about being evaluated by others (Cottrell, 1972) or from conflict between paying attention to a task and to an audience (e.g. Sanders, 1981). Still other researchers discard the notion of drive entirely. They suggest that social facilitation may occur because of distraction and subsequent narrowing of attention, which hinders performance of poorly learned or difficult tasks but leaves unaffected or improves performance of well learned or easy tasks (Baron, 1986; Manstead & Semin, 1980).
Alternatively, social presence might motivate concern with self-presentation – i.e. how we appear to others (rather than concern specifically about being evaluated by them) (Bond, 1982) or make us more self-aware (Wicklund, 1975). This might then increase cognitive effort, which is considered to improve performance on easy tasks but not on difficult tasks (where failure and social embarrassment might be anticipated). Overall, then, the empirical finding from this body of research is that the presence of others improves performance on easy tasks, but impairs performance on difficult tasks (see Bond & Titus, 1983). But no single explanation seems to account for social facilitation and social inhibition effects (Guerin, 1993). Instead, several concepts – including arousal, evaluation apprehension, and distraction conflict – are involved. Bystander apathy and intervention. One type of behaviour that might be affected by the presence of other people is our inclination to offer help to someone who needs it. This question can be studied from many perspectives. One of these is evolutionary psychology – do people help others simply as members of their own species, or only those with whom they shares genes? (see Batson, 1983; and Dawkins’, 1976, notion of the ‘selfish gene’). Another perspective is that of socialization – do we learn to help others as a result of direct instructions, reinforcement, social learning and modelling (see Bandura, 1973)? Two of the most important lines of research on helping by social psychologists have focused on situational factors thatencourage or discourage helping, and on what motives may underlie helping others.
A critical feature of the immediate situation that determines whether by standers help someone who is in need of help (bystander intervention) is the number of potential helpers who are present. This approach was stimulated by the widely reported murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964: although 38 people admitted witnessing the murder, not a single person ran to her aid. To explain bystander intervention (or its opposite – apathy), Darley, Latané and others carried out a series of classic experiments (Darley & Batson, 1973; Darley & Latané, 1968; Latané & Rodin, 1969). Numerous studies indicate that the willingness to intervene in emergencies is higher when a bystander is alone (Latané & Nida, 1981). In one of the first experiments showing this effect (Latané & Rodin, 1969), students overheard that a woman working in theoffice next door had climbed onto a chair, fallen on the loor and lay moaning in pain. This incident lasted 130 seconds. In one condition, the student who overheard the information was alone. In a second condition, another student (a confederate of the experimenter, who had been instructed to be passive) was also present.
In a third condition, the student participant was with a stranger at the time of the accident, and in a fourth condition the student participant was with a friend. Although two people could have intervened in the third and fourth conditions, in only 40 per cent of stranger dyads and 70 per cent of friend dyads did at least one student intervene. The individual likelihood of intervention has to be calculated according to a special formula that corrects for the fact that two people are free to act in two conditions (with stranger; with friend), but only one person is free to act in the remaining two conditions (with passive confederate; alone). The individual likelihood of intervention was in fact twice as high when students were with a friend (i.e. fourth condition) compared with a stranger (i.e. third condition). Both of these corrected intervention rates for the third and fourth conditions were lower than in the condition where the participant was alone (first condition), but higher than in the second condition, where there was a passive confederate present at the time of the accident.
Subsequent research indicated that three types of social process seem to cause the social inhibition of helping in such situations:
1. diffusion of responsibility (when others are present, our own perceived responsibility is lowered);
2. ignorance about how others interpret the event; and
3. feelings of unease about how our own behaviour will be evaluated by others present.
So, witnesses to the Kitty Genovese murder may have failed to intervene because:
1. they saw other people present, and so did not feel responsible;
2. they were unsure about how the others present interpreted the situation; and
3. they were embarrassed about how they might look if they rushed in to help when, for some reason, this might be inappropriate.
On the basis of studies such as this, Latané and Darley (1970) proposed a cognitive model of bystander intervention. Helping (or not) was considered to depend on a series of decisions:
1. noticing that something is wrong;
2. defining it as an emergency;
3. deciding whether to take personal responsibility;
4. deciding what type of help to give; and
5. implementing the decision.
Bystanders also seem to weigh up costs and benefits of intervention vs. apathy before deciding what to do. Piliavin, Dovidio, Gaertner and Clark (1981) proposed a bystander calculus model that assigns a key role to arousal. They proposed that emergencies make us aroused, situational factors determine how that arousal is labelled and what emotion is felt (see chapter 6), and then we assess the costs and benefits of helping or not helping before deciding what to do.
To summarize findings from this area of research, the presence of multiple bystanders seems the strongest inhibitor of bystander intervention due to diffusion of personal responsibility, fear of social blunders and social reinforcement for inaction. In addition, the costs of not helping are apparently reduced by the presence of other potential helpers. People tend to help more if they are alone or among friends, if situational norms or others’ behaviour prescribe helping, if they feel they have the skills to offer effective help, or if the personal costs of not helping are high. Motives for helping A rather different line of research has concentrated on the motives underlying helping (or, more generally, prosocial behaviour) – in particular, whether people help for altruistic or egoistic motives. A discussion of the genetic argument is beyond this chapter (see Dawkins, 1976; Bierhoff, 2002).
Batson and colleagues (1981) had female students observe ‘Elaine’, an experimental confederate, who was apparently receiving electric shocks. In the second trial of the experiment, Elaine appeared to be suffering greatly from the shocks, at which point the experimenter asked the female observer whether she would be willing to continue with the experiment by taking Elaine’s place.
In one condition, participants believed that Elaine shared many attitudes with them. In another condition, they were led to think that she held dissimilar attitudes. The experiment also manipulated difficulty of escape. In the ‘easy escape’ condition, participants knew that they could leave the observation room after the second trial, which meant that they would not be forced to continue observing Elaine’s plight if the experiment continued with her. In the ‘difficult escape’ condition, they were instructed to observe the victim through to the end of the study.participants only took up the option offered by the ‘easy escape’ condition and failed to help when the victim had dissimilar attitudes. These results were interpreted as being consistent with the hypothesis that high attitude similarity increases altruistic motivation, whereas low attitude similarity encourages egoistic motivation.
Batson’s altruism theory was opposed by the view that people were, in fact, helping for selfish, rather than altruistic, motives. So helping could sometimes be otivated by an egoistic desire to gain relief from a negative state (such as distress, guilt or unhappiness) when faced with another person in need of help. Although a meta-analysis by Carlson and Miller (1987) did not support this idea, there is continued controversy between the ‘altruists’ and ‘egoists’ as to why we help others (see Batson et al., 1997; Cialdini et al., 1997; Schaller & Cialdini, 1988). Batson (e.g., 1991) continues to maintain that helping under the conditions investigated by him is motivated positively by the feeling of ‘situational empathy’, rather than by an egoistic desire to relieve the ‘situational distress’ of watching another person suffer.
Helping is also increased by prosocial societal or group norms. These can be general norms of reciprocity (‘help those who help you’; Gouldner, 1960) or social responsibility (‘help those in need;’ Berkowitz, 1972), or more specific helping norms tied to the nature of a social group (e.g. ‘we should help older people’).
Other factors that increase helping include being in a good mood (Isen, 1987) and assuming a leadership role in the situation (Baumeister, Chesner, Senders & Tice, 1988). Research has also shown that, relative to situational variables, personality and gender are poor predictors of helping (Huston & Korte, 1976; Latané & Darley, 1970). Note that many of these studies on helping are ‘high impact’ experiments – fascinating to read about but potentially distressing to participate in. Because of the greater sensitivity to ethical issueschapter.
3. they were embarrassed about how they might look if they rushed in to help when, for some reason, this might be inappropriate.
On the basis of studies such as this, Latané and Darley (1970) proposed a cognitive model of bystander intervention. Helping (or not) was considered to depend on a series of decisions:
1. noticing that something is wrong;
2. defining it as an emergency;
3. deciding whether to take personal responsibility;
4. deciding what type of help to give; and
5. implementing the decision.
Bystanders also seem to weigh up costs and benefits of intervention vs. apathy before deciding what to do. Piliavin, Dovidio, Gaertner and Clark (1981) proposed a bystander calculus model that assigns a key role to arousal. They proposed that emergencies make us aroused, situational factors determine how that arousal is labelled and what emotion is felt (see chapter 6), and then we assess the costs and benefits of helping or not helping before deciding what to do.
To summarize findings from this area of research, the presence of multiple bystanders seems the strongest inhibitor of bystander intervention due to diffusion of personal responsibility, fear of social blunders and social reinforcement for inaction. In addition, the costs of not helping are apparently reduced by the presence of other potential helpers. People tend to help more if they are alone or among friends, if situational norms or others’ behaviour prescribe helping, if they feel they have the skills to offer effective help, or if the personal costs of not helping are high. Motives for helping A rather different line of research has concentrated on the motives underlying helping (or, more generally, prosocial behaviour) – in particular, whether people help for altruistic or egoistic motives. A discussion of the genetic argument is beyond this chapter (see Dawkins, 1976; Bierhoff, 2002).
Batson and colleagues (1981) had female students observe ‘Elaine’, an experimental confederate, who was apparently receiving electric shocks. In the second trial of the experiment, Elaine appeared to be suffering greatly from the shocks, at which point the experimenter asked the female observer whether she would be willing to continue with the experiment by taking Elaine’s place.
In one condition, participants believed that Elaine shared many attitudes with them. In another condition, they were led to think that she held dissimilar attitudes. The experiment also manipulated difficulty of escape. In the ‘easy escape’ condition, participants knew that they could leave the observation room after the second trial, which meant that they would not be forced to continue observing Elaine’s plight if the experiment continued with her. In the ‘difficult escape’ condition, they were instructed to observe the victim through to the end of the study.participants only took up the option offered by the ‘easy escape’ condition and failed to help when the victim had dissimilar attitudes. These results were interpreted as being consistent with the hypothesis that high attitude similarity increases altruistic motivation, whereas low attitude similarity encourages egoistic motivation.
Batson’s altruism theory was opposed by the view that people were, in fact, helping for selfish, rather than altruistic, motives. So helping could sometimes be otivated by an egoistic desire to gain relief from a negative state (such as distress, guilt or unhappiness) when faced with another person in need of help. Although a meta-analysis by Carlson and Miller (1987) did not support this idea, there is continued controversy between the ‘altruists’ and ‘egoists’ as to why we help others (see Batson et al., 1997; Cialdini et al., 1997; Schaller & Cialdini, 1988). Batson (e.g., 1991) continues to maintain that helping under the conditions investigated by him is motivated positively by the feeling of ‘situational empathy’, rather than by an egoistic desire to relieve the ‘situational distress’ of watching another person suffer.
Helping is also increased by prosocial societal or group norms. These can be general norms of reciprocity (‘help those who help you’; Gouldner, 1960) or social responsibility (‘help those in need;’ Berkowitz, 1972), or more specific helping norms tied to the nature of a social group (e.g. ‘we should help older people’).
Other factors that increase helping include being in a good mood (Isen, 1987) and assuming a leadership role in the situation (Baumeister, Chesner, Senders & Tice, 1988). Research has also shown that, relative to situational variables, personality and gender are poor predictors of helping (Huston & Korte, 1976; Latané & Darley, 1970). Note that many of these studies on helping are ‘high impact’ experiments – fascinating to read about but potentially distressing to participate in. Because of the greater sensitivity to ethical issueschapter.
No comments:
Post a Comment