MODULE 5

PRO SOCIAl
Behaviour
By- Nandini Jain
Enrollment number- A1506923424
Section- B
 What is pro social
behaviour?
•Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. These actions
are characterized by a concern for the rights, feelings, and welfare of other
people.
•Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy and
concern for others.
•Prosocial behavior includes a wide range of actions such as helping, sharing,
comforting, and cooperating.
The term itself originated during the 1970s and was introduced by social
scientists as an antonym for the term antisocial behavior
 Examples

Helping others
Donating time, effort, or money
Volunteering
Helping in an emergency
Helping in a non-emergency
Cooperating rather than competing
 Benefits of pro social
behavior
•Mood-boosting effects:
Research has also shown •Stress-reducing effects:
that people who engage Research has also found
in prosocial behaviors are that engaging in prosocial
more likely to experience behaviors helps mitigate
better moods. the negative emotional
effects of stress.
Research has shown that
social support can have a
Social support benefits:
powerful impact on
Having social support
many aspects of wellness,
can be crucial for
including reducing the
getting through difficult
risk of loneliness, alcohol
times
use, and depression
 types of pro social
behaviour

reactive
These are actions that are
PRoactive performed in response to
These are pro-social actions individual needs
that serve self-benefitting
purposes
altruistic
•These include actions that are
meant to help others without
any expectations of personal
gain.
 Causes of pro social
behaviour
evolutionary
influences
•Evolutionary psychologists often
explain pro-social behaviors in terms of
the principles of natural selection.
•Kin selection suggests that helping
members of your own genetic family
makes it more likely that your kin will
survive and pass on genes to future
generations.
•Researchers have been able to produce
some evidence that people are often
more likely to help those to whom they
are closely related.
Personal
benefits
•Pro-social behaviors are often
seen as being compelled by a
number of factors including
egoistic reasons (doing things to
improve one's self-image)
•Reciprocal benefits (doing
something nice for someone so
that they may one day return the
favor)
•Altruistic reasons (performing
actions purely out of empathy for
another individual).
Emotional Empathy
Social psychology researchers Hodges and Myers
describe emotional empathy in three parts
vFeeling the same emotion as the other person
vFeeling our own distress in response to their pain
vFeeling compassion toward the other person
They note that there is a positive correlation
between emotional empathy and the willingness to
help other
 emPATHY- ALTRuism
hypotheses

It is proposed that pro social behaviour is motivated

solely on the basis of helping someone in need. It
claims that empathic concern. produces altruistic
motivation (a motivational state with the ultimate goal
of reducing that need). According to Batson's
"empathy-altruism hypothesis", if someone feels
empathy towards another person, they will help them,
regardless of what they can gain from it.
 Models of
altruism

Negative state
relief model
Helping others aids in empathy- altruism
eliminating negative moods model
and unpleasant feeling Unselfish behaviour can
occur as a result of empathy
cost reward with or understanding of
model another person
the tendancy to assess how
much to gain or to lose from
the situation
 factors that increase pro
social behaviour

1.Helping people similar to ourselves

2. If a person is similar to us in age, nationality,some other
factors, we are most likely to help them
We empathize better with people who we find similar to
us
3. Exposure to pro social Models leads people to engage
in helping behavior more.
4.Feelings that reduce our focus on ourselves
Social Class-Do people who have less give more
 factors that reduce
helping

•Social Exclusion-Being left out hurts and

may reduce the tendency to help
•Darkness and anonymity decreases pro
social behavior
•Putting an economic value on our time
may reduce our tendency to help others
Thank
You