Acceptance of Help as a Function of Similarity of the Potential Helper and Opportunity To Repay1

College students were given the task of making an object from balloons while being observed by someone who they were told had highly similar values (similar conditions) or highly dissimilar values (dissimilar conditions). Later they were to observe while the other made an object from wire coat hangers that were already unwound (no opportunity to repay conditions) or were not unwound (opportunity to repay conditions). In preparation for the subject's task, the balloons had to be blown up and the other offered to help. The number of balloons the subject gave the other was the measure of acceptance of help. An interaction between similarity and opportunity to repay was found. As hypothesized, acceptance of help was greater when the potential helper was similar than when he was dissimilar only when the opportunity to repay was anticipated; when no opportunity to repay was expected, the reverse was found.     

Helping as a function of feeling state and nature of the helping behavior

The proposition that positive feelings increase helping because they increase the perception of personal power implies that if the person prefers not to help, positive feelings would decrease helping. This was tested in an experiment that varied feelings and pleasantness of the helping task. False meter feedback was used to manipulate feelings, and an indirect check on the manipulation showed that it was effective in varying feelings. As expected from the notion that positive feelings allow the person to feel free to refuse to help, there was an interaction between feelings and pleasantness of the helping task; positive feelings produced less helping than neutral or negative feelings when the helping task was unpleasant.This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.