Altruism is an unselfish concern for the welfare of others. In rescuing his jailer, Dirk Willems (who we met in Unit XIV’s beginning) exemplified altruism. Willems fits the definition of a hero—moral, courageous, and protective of those in need (Kinsella et al., 2015). Carl Wilkens and Paul Rusesabagina displayed another heroic example of altruism in Kigali, Rwanda. Wilkens, a Seventh-day Adventist missionary, was living there in 1994 with his family when militia from the Hutu ethnic group began to slaughter members of a minority ethnic group, the Tutsis. The U.S. government, church leaders, and friends all implored Wilkens to leave. He refused. After evacuating his family, and after every other American had left Kigali, he alone stayed and contested the 800,000-person genocide. When the militia came to kill him and his Tutsi servants, Wilkens’ Hutu neighbors deterred them. Despite repeated death threats, he spent his days running roadblocks to take food and water to orphanages and to negotiate, plead, and bully his way through the bloodshed, saving lives time and again. “It just seemed the right thing to do,” he later explained (Kristof, 2004).
Elsewhere in Kigali, Rusesabagina, a Hutu married to a Tutsi and the acting manager of a luxury hotel, was sheltering more than 1200 terrified Tutsis and moderate Hutus. When international peacekeepers abandoned the city and hostile militia threatened his guests in the “Hotel Rwanda” (as it came to be called in a 2004 movie), the courageous Rusesabagina began cashing in past favors. He bribed the militia and telephoned influential people abroad to exert pressure on local authorities, thereby sparing the lives of the hotel’s occupants, despite the surrounding chaos. Both Wilkens and Rusesabagina were displaying altruism, an unselfish regard for the welfare of others.
“ Probably no single incident has caused social psychologists to pay as much attention to an aspect of social behavior as Kitty Genovese’s murder.”
R. Lance Shotland (1984)
Altruism became a major concern of social psychologists after an especially vile act. On March 13, 1964, a stalker repeatedly stabbed Kitty Genovese, then raped her as she lay dying outside her Queens, New York, apartment at 3:30 A.M. “Oh, my God, he stabbed me!” Genovese screamed into the early morning stillness. “Please help me!” Windows opened and lights went on as some neighbors heard her screams. Her attacker fled and then returned to stab and rape her again. Until it was too late, no one called police or came to her aid.
Although initial reports of the Genovese murder overestimated the number of witnesses, the reports triggered outrage over the bystanders’ apparent “apathy” and “indifference.” Rather than blaming the onlookers, social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968b) attributed their inaction to an important situational factor—the presence of others. Given certain circumstances, they suspected, most of us might behave similarly. To paraphrase the French writer Voltaire, we all are guilty of the good we did not do.
After staging emergencies under various conditions, Darley and Latané assembled their findings into a decision scheme: We will help only if the situation enables us first to notice the incident, then to interpret it as an emergency, and finally to assume responsibility for helping (Figure 80.1). At each step, the presence of others can turn us away from the path that leads to helping.
One of Darley and Latané’s experiments staged a fake emergency as students in separate laboratory rooms took turns talking over an intercom. Only the person whose microphone was switched on could be heard. When his turn came, one student (an accomplice of the experimenters) pretended to have an epileptic seizure, and he called for help (Darley & Latané, 1968a).
How did the others react? As Figure 80.2 shows, those who believed only they could hear the victim—and therefore thought they alone were responsible for helping him—usually went to his aid. Students who thought others could also hear the victim’s cries were more likely to do nothing. When more people shared responsibility for helping—when there was a diffusion of responsibility—any single listener was less likely to help. Inattention and diffused responsibility also contribute to the “global bystander nonintervention” as millions of far-away people die of hunger, disease, and genocide (Pittinsky & Diamante, 2015).
Hundreds of additional experiments have confirmed this bystander effect. For example, researchers and their assistants took 1497 elevator rides in three cities and “accidentally” dropped coins or pencils in front of 4813 fellow passengers (Latané & Dabbs, 1975). When alone with the person in need, 40 percent helped; in the presence of 5 other bystanders, only 20 percent helped. The presence of bystanders reduces brain activation in the motor cortex, signaling that we don’t need to take action (Hortenhuis & de Gelder, 2014).
Observations of behavior in thousands of these situations—relaying an emergency phone call, aiding a stranded motorist, donating blood, picking up dropped books, contributing money, giving time—show that the odds of our helping someone depend on the characteristics of the person, the situation, and our own internal state. The odds of helping are highest when
This last result, that happy people are helpful people, is one of psychology’s most consistent findings. As poet Robert Browning (1868) observed, “Oh, make us happy and you make us good!” It doesn’t matter how we are cheered. Whether by being made to feel successful and intelligent, by thinking happy thoughts, by finding money, or even by receiving a posthypnotic suggestion, we become more generous and more eager to help (Carlson et al., 1988). And if our feeling of elevation follows witnessing or learning of someone else’s self-giving deed, our helping will become even more pronounced (Schnall et al., 2010).
So happiness breeds helpfulness. But it’s also true that helpfulness breeds happiness. Helping those in need activates brain areas associated with reward (Harbaugh et al., 2007; Kawamichi et al., 2015). That helps explain a curious finding: People who give money away are happier than those who spend it almost entirely on themselves. In one controlled experiment, researchers gave people an envelope with cash and instructed one group to spend it on themselves and another to spend it on others (Dunn et al., 2008; Dunn & Norton, 2013). Which group was happiest at the day’s end? It was, indeed, those assigned to the spend-it-on-others condition. And in a survey of more than 200,000 people worldwide, people in both rich and poor countries were happier with their lives if they had donated to a charity in the last month. Just reflecting on an instance of spending money on others provides most people with a mood boost (Aknin et al., 2013).
Why do we help? One widely held view is that self-interest underlies all human interactions, that our constant goal is to maximize rewards and minimize costs. Accountants call it cost-benefit analysis. Philosophers call it utilitarianism. Social psychologists call it social exchange theory. If you are considering donating blood, you may weigh the costs of doing so (time, discomfort, anxiety) against the benefits (reduced guilt, social approval, good feelings). If the rewards exceed the costs, you will help.
Others believe we help because we have been socialized to do so, through norms that prescribe how we ought to behave (Everett et al., 2015). Two such norms are the reciprocity norm and the social-responsibility norm:
The reciprocity norm is the expectation that we should return help, not harm, to those who have helped us. In our relations with others of similar status, this norm compels us to give (in favors, gifts, or social invitations) about as much as we receive. Sometimes this means “paying it forward,” as happened in one experiment, when people who were treated generously became more likely to be generous to a stranger (Tsvetkova & Macy, 2014). Returning favors feels good, making the norm of reciprocity a pleasant strategy to help others (Hein et al., 2016).
The reciprocity norm kicked in after Dave Tally, a Tempe, Arizona, homeless man, found $3300 in a backpack that an Arizona State University student had misplaced on his way to buy a used car (Lacey, 2010). Instead of using the cash for much-needed bike repairs, food, and shelter, Tally turned the backpack in to the social service agency where he volunteered. To reciprocate Tally’s help, the backpack’s owner thanked him with a reward. Hearing about Tally’s self-giving deeds, dozens of others also sent him money and job offers.
The social-responsibility norm is the expectation that we should help those who need our help—young children and others who cannot give as much as they receive—even if the costs outweigh the benefits. Europeans are most welcoming of asylum seekers who are most vulnerable—those, for example, who have been tortured or have no surviving family (Bansak et al., 2016). Construction worker Wesley Autrey exemplified the social-responsibility norm on January 2, 2007. He and his 6- and 4-year-old daughters were awaiting a New York City subway train when, before them, a man collapsed in a seizure, got up, then stumbled to the platform’s edge and fell onto the tracks. With train headlights approaching, “I had to make a split-second decision,” Autrey later recalled (Buckley, 2007). His decision, as his girls looked on in horror, was to leap from the platform, push the man off the tracks and into a foot-deep space between them, and lay atop him. As the train screeched to a halt, five cars traveled just above his head, leaving grease on his knit cap. When Autrey cried out, “I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father is okay,” onlookers erupted into applause.
Many world religions encourage their followers to practice the social-responsibility norm, and sometimes this leads to prosocial behavior. Between 2006 and 2008, Gallup polls sampled more than 300,000 people across 140 countries, comparing the “highly religious” (who said religion was important to them and who had attended a religious service in the prior week) to those less religious. The highly religious, despite being poorer, were about 50 percent more likely to report having “donated money to a charity in the last month” and to have volunteered time to an organization (Pelham & Crabtree, 2008).