In what circumstances does one person help another? What personal qualities and external circumstances make kind actions more likely to occur?
Dear Year 11 students,
As you have no doubt realised after a year or more of study, psychologists like to assign numbers to seemingly immeasurable qualities, just to show that every human behaviour can be studied in some way. It seems that even kindness can be quantified.
Kindness may not seem a very scientific concept, but if you call it prosocial behaviour instead, generate precise definitions of what constitutes it and set up experiments to discover when people show it and when they don’t, you can begin to get a handle on this nebulous idea.
Prosocial behaviour means helping another person or, in a broader sense, acting in a way that benefits society as a whole. It encompasses activities such as helping an old person across a road, donating money to charity, giving aid when someone is injured or even donating a kidney to a person with kidney disease. In other words, prosocial behaviour is a phrase for the act of being kind to the other people who inhabit the world.
Not surprisingly, research psychologists have come up with some entertaining and occasionally alarming ways of studying prosocial behaviour. For instance, in the footage below, which is completely silent but strangely compelling, you can observe whether a person, when left alone, decides to report a fire. You can then watch how a person in a group reacts to exactly the same stimulus: that is, smoke pouring into the room. Whether the person is alone or not affects the reaction, as you will see. The possible reasons for the different response are introduced in the slideshow beneath the footage.
Having observed this relatively old study, you might like to attempt the true/false quiz in the slideshow below, then watch a recent study about rats, one of my favourite animals. As you will see, the rats in this study showed that humans have no monopoly on kindness. Of course, the researchers did not call it that. Their name for it was “empathically motivated helping behaviour”.
