Psychology in Minutes by Marcus Weeks

Author:Marcus Weeks [Weeks, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2015-08-03T14:00:00+00:00

Altruism and prosocial behaviour

Following the Second World War, much social psychology focused, unsurprisingly, on understanding what social forces influenced ordinary people to behave in violent and antisocial ways. For the most part, however, people behave kindly to one another and our social institutions rely upon cooperation and prosocial behaviour as much as the obligations of conformity and obedience.

For evolutionary psychologists, such altruistic behaviour is ‘hardwired’. Other social psychologists proposed a social exchange theory – the costs and rewards of our actions are carefully weighed, and that apparent altruism is never more than what is ultimately beneficial to ourselves. Not everyone agreed with this cynical interpretation of prosocial behaviour. C. Daniel Batson believed that we are capable of truly altruistic behaviour, stemming from our ability to empathize with others. Our empathetic concern for the needs or distress of other people acts as a motivating drive for acts of kindness and help.

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