Who Helps and Why: Predictors, Definitions, and Mood as a Driver of Helping

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Who Helps and Why: Predictors, Definitions, and Mood as a Driver of Helping

Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 10: Altruism, Helping, and Prosocial BehaviorSection 10.3 · lesson 66 of 859 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

The personal predictors of helping, and the surprising ways passing mood tips the balance.

  • Separate egoism from altruism by goal structure
  • Name the personal predictors and their limits
  • Explain positive-mood facilitation and its boundary
  • State what would falsify negative-state relief

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,264 words). Read along, or search it.

Altruism, Helping, and Prosocial Behavior

Who Helps and Why

Helping is not equally probable across people, moments, or moods. Two people facing an identical opportunity can act completely differently. And the same person can act differently from one hour to the next. This section is about both kinds of variation. First, who tends to help, and which traits actually carry predictive weight. Then something stranger: how a passing mood tips the decision. The mood findings are the ones students remember, and often misremember. Good mood does not simply make people kinder. Under one specific condition, it makes them less willing to help. Getting that condition right is the point of the second half.

Refined Definitions

Four Terms, One Sorting Question

Start by tightening four terms that have to carry the analysis. Prosocial behavior is any act intended to benefit another person. Motive plays no part in that label at all. Helping is the subset of prosocial acts that responds to a specific need. Altruism is narrower again. It requires genuine concern for the other, with no anticipated personal reward. And egoism is motivation in which the helper's own welfare is the ultimate goal. Now the distinction people most often get wrong. Egoism and altruism are not the same as helping and not helping. Both can produce identical outward behavior. The difference lies entirely in the helper's goal structure.

Worked Cases

Same Act, Different Goal Structure

Concrete cases make the goal structure visible. Donating publicly in order to enhance your reputation is egoistic. So is helping a colleague in order to secure a future favor. In both, the other person genuinely gains. But that gain is instrumental. It is a route to something else. Now the altruistic case. Anonymously donating blood to a stranger, with no expectation of reward. No recognition, and no audience. The act is unchanged either way. Most real helping, though, is mixed. Rescue a stranger from a burning car and both motives are present. Empathic concern, and the social esteem of having acted. The sorting here is analytic, not moral. Mixed motives are the normal case.

Trait Predictors

The Altruistic Personality

Turn to who helps. Several traits predict helping across situations, but with an important caveat. No single trait predicts strongly on its own. People high in agreeableness help more frequently. So do people high in perspective-taking, and in internalized moral identity. The altruistic personality construct bundles those traits together. And it adds something else: a self-concept organized around prosocial values. People who think of themselves as helpful are more likely to act helpfully. Now read the qualifier, because it does most of the work. That link is strongest under low situational pressure. Turn the pressure up and the trait signal gets swamped.

Capacity And Confidence

Empathy, Perspective-Taking, and Efficacy

Two capacities carry more predictive weight than the rest. Dispositional empathy is the trait-level tendency to feel concern for others. It is among the most reliable individual predictors we have. It interacts with cognitive perspective-taking, which is a different ability. Perspective-taking is the capacity to imagine the other person's viewpoint. The combination predicts better than either component alone. These capacities are partly heritable, and they are also trainable. The third predictor is self-efficacy, and it is the most practical one. People help more when they believe they can actually help. Trained responders intervene in medical emergencies more reliably than untrained bystanders. Their values are not different. Their confidence in their own ability is. Competence lowers the perceived cost of helping, and raises the cost of inaction.

Values

Religion, Ideology, and Moral Identity

Values and religion also predict helping, though modestly. The pattern is specific, and the qualifiers matter more than the headline. Religious involvement predicts helping most strongly within ingroup boundaries. And most strongly through institutional channels. Charitable giving, and volunteering, are the clearest examples. Secular values can do exactly the same work. But there is a condition attached, and it applies to both. Values predict helping when they are deeply integrated into the self-concept. Not when they are held as abstract endorsements. Agreeing with a principle is not the same as being the person it describes. Integration beats endorsement, every time.

Predictors In View

Four Families of Personal Predictor

Four families of personal predictor, then. The altruistic personality, bundling agreeableness and moral identity. Dispositional empathy, working together with perspective-taking. Self-efficacy and competence, which change the felt price of acting. Now the warning that keeps all four honest. Personal predictors set probabilities. They do not set certainties. The altruistic personality helps more than average, and that is all. Situational pressures can override traits in any given moment. Diffusion of responsibility, time pressure, and audience inhibition all do it. So the cleanest predictions come from trait-by-situation interactions. Never from traits considered alone.

Feel Good, Do Good

How Little It Takes to Shift Helping

Now the momentary layer, and this is where the findings get surprising. Alice Isen and colleagues studied what small mood boosts do to helping. The manipulations were almost comically minor. Participants unexpectedly found a coin in a payphone. Or received a free cookie. Or were simply exposed to pleasant weather. Moments later, those participants were significantly more likely to help a stranger. They picked up dropped papers. They mailed a misdirected letter, or made change for someone. Hold on to the scale of what caused this. A cookie. A coin. A sunny afternoon. Whatever is going on here, it is not deep moral change.

Mechanisms

Three Routes From Good Mood to Helping

Three mechanisms are typically invoked to explain the effect. They are not interchangeable, and the third one has a sting in its tail. First, attention. Positive mood directs attention toward the rewarding aspects of the environment. That includes rewarding social cues, which is what a person in need supplies. Second, cognition. A good mood generates more positive thoughts about other people. Third, mood maintenance. Being in a good mood motivates you to keep it going. And helping is one available route to doing exactly that. The first two raise helping unconditionally. The third makes it conditional on whether helping preserves the mood.

The Boundary

When Good Mood Suppresses Helping

That third mechanism produces a genuinely counter-intuitive prediction. Happy people should be less willing to help when helping itself is unpleasant. The test case is a task that is gruesome, or saddening. So the mood-maintenance account predicts you will decline. Several studies confirm exactly that. Which complicates the simple feel-good, do-good headline considerably. State the hypothesis carefully. Positive mood facilitates helping when helping sustains the mood. And it inhibits helping when helping would burst it. So mood does not raise generosity in the abstract. It raises your sensitivity to what generosity would cost your mood.

Repairing A Bad Mood

Negative-State Relief and Its Falsifier

Bad moods have their own route to helping, and it works differently. Cialdini's negative-state relief model explains it as learning. Adults learn, over many trials, that helping makes them feel better. So a sad or guilty adult is primed to help. Helping is one of several well-learned routes to mood repair. Now the boundary condition, which is what makes this a real model. Suppose the negative mood is dispelled by some other means first. A compliment, a small reward, even reading something mood-lifting. Then the helping advantage should disappear entirely. The evidence is supportive but not unanimous. The strongest effects appear in adults. And in moods involving guilt or transgression, rather than pure sadness.

Consolidate

Trait, Situation, and Mood Together

No single layer of prediction is sufficient on its own. Consider the two easy ends of the range first. A high-empathy person, in a good mood, facing a low-cost opportunity. That person will almost certainly help. A low-empathy person, in a bad mood, facing a high-cost opportunity. That person almost certainly will not. The interesting cases lie in between. The high-empathy person who happens to be in a foul mood. Or the low-empathy person briefly lifted by a small windfall. There, mood and situation can matter as much as enduring disposition. This is the model the next sections use to analyze failures of helping.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Who Helps and Why: Predictors, Definitions, and Mood as a Driver of Helping

Does being in a good mood make people more helpful?
Usually, yes. In classic studies by Alice Isen and colleagues, small mood boosts, such as finding a coin in a pay phone or receiving a free cookie, made people more likely to help a stranger moments later, for example by picking up dropped papers. Pleasant weather has shown similar effects. A good mood draws attention to rewarding cues and promotes positive thoughts about others, though some of these specific findings have not replicated consistently.
When does a good mood make people less likely to help?
A good mood can reduce helping when the helping task itself would spoil the mood, such as a gruesome or saddening request. According to the mood-maintenance account, people in a good mood want to keep it, so they help when helping sustains the mood and decline when it would ruin it. A good mood therefore makes people more sensitive to what helping would cost them emotionally, not simply more generous.
What is the negative-state relief model of helping?
Robert Cialdini's negative-state relief model proposes that people in a sad or guilty mood help others partly to make themselves feel better, because adults have learned that helping relieves bad feelings. Its key prediction is that if the bad mood is lifted another way first, such as with a compliment or small reward, the extra helping should disappear. Evidence is supportive but mixed, and effects are strongest in adults and in guilt-related moods.
What personality traits predict helping behavior?
Dispositional empathy is one of the most reliable trait predictors of helping, especially when combined with perspective-taking, the ability to imagine another person's viewpoint. Agreeableness, a strong moral identity, and self-efficacy, the belief that you can actually help, also predict helping, which is one reason trained responders intervene more in medical emergencies. Traits set probabilities, not certainties, and situational pressures such as time pressure or other bystanders can override them.

About the Advanced Social Psychology course

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Advanced Social Psychology (Psychology 310) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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$250, paid once, with lifetime access: all 85 video lessons, a practice quiz after each, the graded work and final exam, and an official transcript when you finish. Students who want several courses choose UPI Study PRO instead.
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