An investigation of planned helping behavior

It is argued that stable, individual differences in helping behavior have not generally been observed in previous research because of the type of helping studied. This paper advocates the study of planned helping behavior as opposed to spontaneous helping behavior. The results of three studies are reported. In Study 1, an instrument designed to measure level of involvement in planned helping activities was developed. Scores on this instrument were found to be stable over a 7-month period. Further analysis revealed two major types of planned helping: (a) formal, organizational helping and (b) informal helping between friends and family. Study 2 examined a variety of intrapsychic and demographic correlates of formal and informal planned helping. Study 3 found support for the hypothesis that people in helping professions have higher levels of involvement in everyday planned helping than do people in nonhelping occupations. It is concluded that the study of planned helping, although posing methodological difficulties, is a necessary adjunct to experimental research.     

The Helping Behavior Helps Lighten Physical Burden

It is often believed that helping behaviors benefit the recipients at the expense of the performers. However, we propose that costly helping behaviors could alleviate feelings of physical burden experienced by the performers. In support of the proposal, we found in five studies that both imaginary and real helping behaviors led the performers to perceive physically challenging tasks as less demanding (Studies 1, 2, 3, 5), such as perceiving a steep mountain road as less steep (Study 2), a heavy carton as lighter (Study 4), and a long path as shorter (Study 5). These results challenge the conventional wisdom that helping behaviors always come at the cost of the helper and corroborate a growing body of literature showing that helping others could benefit the performer.     

The interactive effects of belongingness and charisma on helping and compliance

This study tests the main and interactive effects of belongingness and perceived charismatic leadership on 2 forms of organizational citizenship behavior (helping and compliance). In line with expectations, a study of 115 manager-subordinate dyads demonstrates that employees show more helping (manager rated) when they have a stronger sense of belongingness at work and more helping as well as compliance when they perceive their leader to be more charismatic (subordinate rated). Belongingness partially mediates the relationship between charisma and helping. Also, as hypothesized, belongingness and charisma have interactive effects on employees' helping and compliance. The impact of perceived charisma on these behaviors is stronger for employees with a low sense of belongingness at work than for individuals with a higher sense of belongingness.     

面孔可信度对助人行为的影响：依恋安全的调节作用

分别从特质依恋和状态依恋角度考察施助者的依恋安全在求助者面孔可信度与助人行为之间的调节作用。结果发现：(1)求助者面孔可信度影响助人行为, 面孔可信度高的求助者得到的助人行为显著多于面孔可信度低的求助者; (2)施助者的依恋安全调节求助者面孔可信度与助人行为之间的关系, 安全依恋能有效缓冲低面孔可信度带来助人行为下降的趋势。本研究结果表明依恋安全有助于提升社会安全感和促进亲社会行为, 因此应注重依恋安全的培养。     

Learning From Service: The Effect of Helping on Helpers' Social Dominance Orientation

Helping behavior can affect the power dynamics between social groups ( Nadler, 2002 ). The present research investigated whether helping also affects one's views of those power dynamics, as indexed by social dominance orientation (SDO) scores ( Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994 ). College students in an introductory psychology course were randomly assigned to a helping (service learning) group or a control group. Students in the helping group participated in 18 hr of community service over 9 weeks, and showed a significant decrease in SDO, compared to the control group. Empathy mediated the relationship between helping and SDO. The pedagogical implications of service learning are also discussed, as are the potential moderating roles of helping type and contact.     

Failure Avoidance Motivation in a Goal-Setting Situation

Scholars have consistently identified contextual performance or organizational citizenship behavior as a core component of job performance. The current literature on this issue has been dominated by a single-level approach, typically conducted at the individual level of analysis. This study adopts a multilevel approach to simultaneously examine main effects of and cross-level interactions among individual- and group-level predictors of interpersonal helping behavior. Results from a large-scale longitudinal data set show that at the individual level, helping behavior was predicted by perceived organizational support (POS), fairness, and affective commitment. At the group level, helping behavior was predicted by trust among group members. Trust among members also significantly moderated the individual-level relationships between POS and helping behavior and between fairness and helping. These crosslevel moderations indicated that the group- and individual-level predictors were complementary (instead of mutually reinforcing) in predicting interpersonal helping behavior. This finding indicates that various antecedents of interpersonal helping are characterized by distinct dynamics at the individual and group levels of analysis.     

工作场所中的助人决策过程

本项目突破了以往研究过于聚焦"助人行为"这一瞬时行为的局限,把工作场所中的助人决策理解为一种基于动态性心理契约的社会性风险投资决策过程,认为人力资源管理的相关实践能够在组织内部为员工之间的这种社会性风险投资决策,创建和维持适宜的投资环境,促使员工愿意、能够、敢于进行助人这种社会性风险投资决策。基于上述思路,项目首先构建工作场所中助人决策的过程机制模型,然后就该模型与以往模型存在的核心差异——反思调整——进行深入探索。随后,就影响助人决策投资环境的重要因素,从人力资源管理职能的角度,分别探讨工作设计和薪酬管理两个方面的重要变量对助人决策的影响机制。最后,基于本项目研究成果,提出能切实促进员工助人决策的、体系化的人力资源管理实践建议。     

Prosocial emotions and helping: the moderating role of group membership

In this article, the authors introduce and test a group-level perspective on the role of empathy and interpersonal attraction in helping. In line with our predictions, Study 1, a longitudinal field study of 166 AIDS volunteers, confirmed that empathy was a stronger predictor of helping when the recipient of assistance was an in-group member than when that person was an out-group member. Also as hypothesized, attraction was a stronger predictor of helping when the recipient was an out-group member than when that person was an in-group member. Study 2 replicated and further extended these results in a laboratory experiment on spontaneous helping of a person with hepatitis. Strengthening the validity of the findings, in both studies the effects of empathy and attraction held up even when the authors statistically controlled for potential alternative predictors of helping. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings for helping in intergroup contexts are discussed.     

Expectation for Mood Enhancement as a Result of Helping: The Effects of Gender and Compassionate Love

Several theoretical perspectives in the social psychology literature on helping suggest that people forecast the benefit that they will receive as a result of helping others, and help only if they determine that it is rewarding to do so. One type of self-benefit that can be received from helping is an enhancement of positive mood. The major hypotheses of the present study were: (1) women, to a greater degree than men, would expect to experience enhanced positive mood as a consequence of both helping and receiving help in a relational context; and (2) those who are high in compassionate love for others would expect to experience enhanced positive mood from giving and receiving help relative to those who are lower on compassionate love. Support was found for both hypotheses. In addition, women were more likely than men to rate certain helping behaviors in a relational context (e.g., providing verbal support) as good examples of “compassionate love acts.” The meaning of the results with respect to altruism and for gender differences in helping behavior is discussed.     

Agreeableness, empathy, and helping: a person x situation perspective

This research program explored links among prosocial motives, empathy, and helping behavior. Preliminary work found significant relations among components of self-reported empathy and personality (N = 223). In Study 1, the authors examined the generality of prosocial behavior across situations and group memberships of victims (N = 622). In Study 2, empathic focus and the victim's outgroup status were experimentally manipulated (N = 87). Study 3 (N = 245) replicated and extended Study 2 by collecting measures of prosocial emotions before helping. In Study 4 (N = 244), empathic focus and cost of helping as predictors of helping behavior were experimentally manipulated. Overall, prosocial motivation is linked to (a) Agreeableness as a dimension of personality, (b) proximal prosocial cognition and motives, and (c) helping behavior across a range of situations and victims. In persons low in prosocial motivation, when costs of helping are high, efforts to induce empathy situationally can undermine prosocial behavior.     

Empathy-motivated helping: the moderating role of group membership

In this article, the authors present two laboratory experiments testing a group-level perspective on the role of empathy in helping. Experiment 1 tested the authors' predictions in an intercultural context of helping. Confirming their specific Empathy x Group Membership moderation hypothesis, empathy had a stronger effect on helping intentions when the helper and the target belonged to the same cultural group than when they belonged to different groups. Experiment 2 replicated these findings in a modified minimal group paradigm using laboratory-created groups. Moreover, this second experiment also provides evidence for the hypothesized psychological mechanisms underlying the empathy-(ingroup) helping relationship. Specifically, analyses in the ingroup condition confirmed that the strength of the empathy-(ingroup) helping relationship systematically varied as a function of perceived similarities among ingroup members. The general implications of these findings for empathy-motivated helping are discussed.     

Helping to improve the group stereotype: on the strategic dimension of prosocial behavior

Three studies consider a basis for intergroup helping. Specifically, they show that group members may help others to disconfirm a stereotype of their own group as mean. Study 1 shows that Scots believe they are seen as mean by the English, resent this stereotype, are motivated to refute it, and believe out-group helping is a particularly effective way of doing so. Study 2 shows that increasing the salience of the English stereotype of the Scottish as mean leads Scots to accentuate the extent to which Scots are depicted as generous. Study 3 shows that increasing the salience of the stereotype of the Scots as mean results in an increase in the help volunteered to out-group members. These results highlight how strategic concerns may result in out-group helping. In turn, they underscore the point that helping others may be a means to advance a group's interest.     

Insight into toddlers’ motivation to help: From social participants to prosocial contributors

What drives toddlers’ helping behavior? And do toddlers’ helping motivations change across time? In line with Dahl and Paulus (2019), we propose that initially, toddlers start helping in ongoing chores driven by their interest in social interactions, and, later on, their helping becomes more concern based, or based on a sense of responsibility. To test this assumption, we used a longitudinal approach to examine the role that social interaction plays in toddlers’ motivation to help as they grow older. As such, we investigated whether a disruption to an experimenter during a shared chore task affected toddlers’ motivations to continue helping at the ages of 18, 21 and 24 months. Results showed that toddlers at 18 months were less likely to continue helping when the experimenter was disrupted from the shared task, in comparison to toddlers at 21 and at 24 months. These findings support the idea that toddlers develop from socially based participators into more prosocially based contributors.     

Helping as a function of empathic responses and sociopathy

The present study reports two experiments which investigated helping as a function of empathic anxiety (anxiety in response to modeled distress) and individual differences in sociopathic tendencies. The first experiment concerned the effects of empathic anxiety, sociopathy, and perceived similarity/dissimilarity to a distressed person on helping. As predicted, subjects who experienced high levels of empathic anxiety helped more than subjects who experienced low levels of empathic anxiety. High sociopathic subjects experienced lower levels of empathic anxiety and helped less than did low sociopathic subjects. However, a path analysis disclosed that sociopathy's relationship to helping was not due to (or mediated by) empathic anxiety. The similarity manipulation did not influence empathic anxiety or helping. In the second experiment, subjects were classified as primary or secondary sociopaths (based on their levels of trait anxiety). As in the first experiment, empathic anxiety and sociopathy were significantly related to helping. Primary sociopaths displayed less empathic anxiety than secondary sociopaths, but the two groups did not differ in their willingness to help. Thus, in neither study could the sociopath's behavior be explained by empathic anxiety. The discussion concerned empathy as a mediational variable in helping and the role of personality variables in helping. A post hoc explanation of the sociopath's behavior, based on Schwartz' theory of the characteristics of helpers, was proposed.     

Professionalism and Helping: Harmonious or Discordant Concepts? An Attribution Theory Perspective

In examining whether a leader's professionalism implies more or fewer helping behaviors for followers, this study designed a model integrating attributional theory explanations with professionalism to predict helping behaviors. Four distinct helping behaviors were conceptualized: supporting, motivating, referral, and rejection. Qualitative methods used in the study consisted of content analysis of interviews with 12 superiors at healthcare organizations concerning their means of helping staff, and the circumstances. Quantitative data were gathered by an experimental design in which four case studies were presented to each of 171 healthcare superiors, who were asked to deal with a distressed staff nurse whose stability and controllability of the distress were rated either high or low. Superiors' professionalism was assessed. Results indicated that the relationship between professionalism and helping was complex, and critically dependent upon the type of helping behaviors provided, the help provider's professionalism, and attributions of the help seeker's controllability and stability. The qualitative and quantitative results favor attribution explanations, and imply that highly professional superiors provide higher levels of supporting, motivating, and rejecting helping behaviors as means to maintain professionalism of staff.     

The “Flash” System: A Field Study of Altruism1

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an experimental automated highway-help system for stranded motorists (the Flash system). Direct and indirect helping behavior rates as a function of the race and sex of supposedly stranded drivers on the Flash-equipped highway were compared to helping rates on a comparable, non-Flash-equipped highway. The results indicated that the automated system produced (a) higher overall helping rates and (b) higher helping rates for white persons, with type of help (direct or indirect) interacting with confederate sex.     

When does self-reported prosocial motivation predict helping? The moderating role of implicit prosocial motivation

In three studies, we tested a motivational model to predict different types of helping from an interactionist, dual-system perspective. We argued that helping behavior is determined by the interplay of two distinct motivational systems: the explicit (i.e., conscious) and the implicit (i.e., unconscious). In line with previous research we expected that explicit prosocial motivation relates to helping, and additionally proposed that depending on the type of helping this relationship is moderated by implicit prosocial motivation: For planned helping, explicit prosocial motivation is a sufficient predictor, regardless of implicit prosocial motivation. For spontaneous helping, on the other hand, the effect of explicit prosocial motivation is moderated by implicit prosocial motivation, and only predictive when also implicit prosocial motivation is high. Study 1 (207 Dutch participants, M _age  = 51.7 years; 51.7 % female) with self-reported willingness to help as dependent variable confirmed that planned helping was determined by explicit prosocial motivation, whereas its effect on spontaneous helping was moderated by implicit prosocial motivation. Study 2 (193 U.S. participants, M _age  = 35.2 years; 64.2 % female) with real-life measures of planned help confirmed the hypothesized main effect of explicit prosocial motivation. Study 3 (73 Dutch participants, M _age  = 20.8 years; 68.5 % female) with a real-life measure of spontaneous helping confirmed the moderating role of implicit prosocial motivation, as the effect of explicit prosocial motivation on helping was only significant for individuals with high implicit prosocial motivation. We argue that considering implicit prosocial motivation provides an overlooked avenue for a more systematic investigation of helping.     

员工为什么乐于助人?多层次的领导–部属交换对帮助行为的影响

基于社会交换理论,以56名直属主管和274名下属的配对数据为样本,考察了多层次的领导–部属交换对个体和团队层次上的帮助行为的影响及作用过程。跨层次分析结果表明:(1)个体层次的人际公平中介了个体和团队层次的领导–部属交换对员工帮助行为的影响;(2)团队层次的人际公平氛围中介了团队平均领导–部属交换对个体和团队层次的帮助行为的影响;(3)领导–部属交换关系差异化对个体和团队层次的领导–部属交换与帮助行为之间的正向关系均具有显著的负向调节作用,即相对于较高的领导–部属交换关系差异化,较低的领导–部属交换关系差异化强化了个体和团队层次的领导–部属交换对帮助行为的影响。     

个体助人行为的形成与发展——基于扎根理论的探究

为了解个体助人行为的发生、发展和变化,本研究采用质性研究方法,围绕日常生活中助人行为深度访谈了10名始成年期的高助人者,运用扎根理论对访谈资料进行分析和理论建构。发现个体助人行为的发展可分成三个阶段：形成期、冲击期及稳固期,各发展阶段以对助人行为的认知和主要动机为核心,呈现出稳定-外控、不稳定-外控、稳定-内控的特点,据此提出助人行为的发展历程,并讨论了研究的理论价值、现实意义及局限。