1. Submitted To: Ma’am Irum Abbasi
Submitted By: Hina Anjum
Submitted On: Sept. 27, 2012
CHAPTER 9
2012
PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR:
Helping Others
ANALYSIS
( F A C U L T Y O F S O C I A L S C I E N C E S - D E P A R T M E N T O F M E D I A & C O M M U N I C A T I O N S T U D I E S )

2. Prosocial Behavior: Helping Others
November 21, 2012
A Formal Analysis of ‘Prosocial Behavior’
The focus of the present chapter is to understand the role of bystanders’ response to nonverbal
cues of other bystanders, the processes of social comparison, attributions, self-concept, similarity
of victim and bystander, affective state and helping, genetics and helping.
Prosocial behavior refers to the actions by individuals that help others with no immediate benefit
to the helper. Helping can be increased by empathy-emotional reactions that are focused on other
people and include feelings of compassion, sympathy and concern. The origin of Prosocial
Behavior includes three different views i.e. empathy-altruism hypothesis that leads us to help
others in need, negative state relief hypothesis that leads us to help others in need to reduce
negative feelings in ourselves and empathy joy hypothesis that leads us to engage ourselves in
prosocial behavior to have a positive impact on others. Prosocial behavior stems from several
different motives and helps us attain many different goals. So this suggests that people have good
reasons for offerings to others.
Failure to act often stems from the belief that someone else will do it. When faced with
emergency one must notice that something unusual is happening, interpret the event as an
emergency, accept responsibility for helping, decide that he has the knowledge or skills needed
to help and then decide to actually help. The tendency to help or not help depends in part on
decision made at these five crucial steps.
The tendency to help others is not equal across different people. In fact, it is strongly influenced
by emotions, empathy, and by several aspects of personality. We are more likely to help others
who are similar to ourselves than others who are dissimilar. Prosocial behavior is found to be
influenced in both positive and negative ways by many aspects of the situation. Empathy is an
important determinant of helping behavior. Several aspects of personality also influence helping
including belief in a just world, social responsibility, internal locus of control, and low
egocentrism.
People volunteer to provide help on a long-term basis as a function of various selfish and selfless
motives. People volunteer for many reasons such as to express or act on important values, to
learn more about world, to develop psychologically, to gain career-related experience, to
strengthen social relationships and to reduce negative feelings. People can be differentiated in
terms of their primary motivation when faced with making a choice that involves relatively
moral versus relatively immoral alternatives. The three primary motives are self-interest, moral
integrity, and moral hypocrisy. People make it seem as if they are acting in a moral way, but
their actual behavior is based on self-interest. So no people do so much harm as those who go
about doing good.