Social Psychology by Paul Seager

Author:Paul Seager
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2014-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

The cognitive model of helping behaviour

Latane and Darley (1968) proposed a cognitive model to explain why people do, or do not, help in an emergency situation (such as the Kitty Genovese incident). They suggested that there were five questions that needed to be answered before an individual would decide to help. At each stage, if the answer was ‘no’, then no help would be forthcoming: only five positive responses would lead to helping behaviour. The stages are:

1 NOTICE THE EVENT

Failure to notice an emergency situation will obviously result in no help being given. To test which factors might be important in explaining whether or not a situation might be noticed, Darley and Batson (1973) conducted a study using students at a theological seminary. Half of the students were asked to think about the parable of the Good Samaritan (helping oriented), and half were asked to think about professional problems facing the priesthood (task oriented). Students were then told that they had to report to another building to give a presentation on their topic, but they were told that either: (i) they had plenty of time to do so (no time pressure); (ii) they had just enough time to do so; or (iii) they were running late (maximum time pressure). En route to the building, it was arranged so that the students would pass someone (a confederate) slumped in an alleyway, head down and eyes closed, coughing and groaning.

The researchers were interested to see who would stop and who would carry on. The obvious expectation was that those who were preparing to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan would be most likely to stop to help. However, this was not the case. It transpired that the best predictor of helping behaviour was the amount of time pressure the participants were under: those with plenty of time to spare were more likely to stop than the others. Those in the maximum time pressure situation seemed not even to notice the confederate. Therefore, time pressure, rather than frame of mind, seems to be a good indicator of whether or not we will even notice an emergency situation.

2 INTERPRET THE EVENT AS AN EMERGENCY

Assuming that the incident is noticed, it must be interpreted as an emergency. Whilst there are times when a situation is a clear-cut emergency, there are many more times where a situation is ambiguous: for example, is the person slumped on the pavement simply drunk or are they seriously ill; is that steam coming out of the vent or smoke from a fire? In an ambiguous situation, we have a tendency to look to others to help us define it; if they appear not to be concerned, then we are more likely to conclude that the situation is a non-emergency. This is referred to as pluralistic ignorance. If, however, a person is on their own, they are much more likely to double-check as they have no frame of reference. This conclusion has been supported by the findings from many experiments.

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