Why Do People Help Others? Essay -- essays research papers

To discuss why people help others we must consider whether people are by constitution selfless or selfish. The dominant view today in psychology is of universal egoism that we are fundamentally selfish, and that altruism (helping motivated by the hankering to benefit another person) an impossibility.One form of universal egoism is Piliavin et als "arousal cost-reward" model, whereby faced with a potential helping situation we weigh the apparent costs and rewards of alternative courses of action, then arrive at a finding which produces the best outcome for ourselves.Darley and Batson (1973) conducted an experiment into the effect of the cost time in the decision to offer help. They found that 63% of students with plenty of time to get to their next lecture helped a man clearly ill in the doorway, whilst 45% who were justly on schedule helped, but only 10% of those who were late. However, although a natural setting was used, as an experiment this evidence is not very ecol ogically valid.The Sociobioligical show up also sees helping as egoistic, but in terms of the individual maximising their inclusive fitness (increasing the chances of their genes being passed on), rather than their personal fitness. This seems to be the crusade when we look at the apparent altruistic behaviour of various species. For example, when a honey bee dies when stinging an enemy, "...by their sacrifice they are increasing the reproductive chances of their fertile relatives therefrom ensuring that the...