Have to Help or Want to Help?


Everyone acts helpful at times. Indeed, most of us act in kind ways several times a day—giving directions to a stranger, explaining the new work process to a colleague, or making the partner’s favorite dinner and maybe even doing their chores as well. But the reasons people give when reflecting on why they help others differ. Some report helping because they like it or enjoy it, because they value the experience and appreciate that their help is useful—they want to help. Others report helping because they feel they should, because they’d feel like a bad person or others would get angry if they did not help—they feel like they have to help.

Imagine this situation. Your friend asks you to help her move. Your friend reminds you how she helped you in the past, tells you how there’s no one else to help and she really can’t do it by herself; she’d likely injure herself trying to move without you. Chances are you’d feel obliged to help because you want to avoid feeling guilty or bad about letting her down. This is the feeling of helping because you have to. Now imagine that you also feel quite excited about spending time with your friend during the moving day. You are glad she is getting a new place and you want to see her happy. You think you’ll enjoy helping her move and contributing to this happiness. This is the feeling of helping because you want to.

Everyone likely encounters situations in which they feel they have to help or in which they feel they want to help. But beyond specific situations, people also generally vary in how much they agree with the idea that helping is enjoyable for its own sake and vary in how much they agree with the idea that helping is an obligation or a duty. Some people might endorse both these reasons, and some might endorse neither.

How Do Want-To and Have-To Reasons Predict Helping?

At Carleton University, Professor Milyavskaya and I asked 619 adults to reflect on their general reasons for helping and found that reasons to help were linked with how often people reported they typically help others and with how much they invest in helping others in a typical day. Feeling the motivation to want to help for its own sake was linked to doing more favors for others and spending more time and effort on helping. Feeling the pressure to have to help was linked with typically spending more money on helping and reporting more effort.

Thinking back to the example of helping a friend move, this finding might be illustrated by considering different ways of helping. If you endorse helping for its own sake, you might spend more time carrying boxes for your friend, whereas if you help primarily out of obligation you might pay for the gas of the moving truck but bow out early on moving day.

When we followed 442 adults over the course of one week, the same pattern emerged. Participants who endorsed the motivation to want to help for its own sake at the beginning of the week, reported more acts of help on a daily basis and reported spending more time and effort on helping on any given day of the week. For example, people who initially stated that want-to-help reasons were “very true” of their personal motivation, would have helped for an estimated 20 minutes more on a given day than people who answered ‘somewhat true.’ Participants who agreed with the sentiment that they feel they have to help at the beginning of the week, reported more acts of help on a daily basis and reported spending more money and more effort on helping at the end of any given day of the week. For example, people who initially stated that have-to-help reasons were “very true” of their personal motivation, would give an estimated $3.00 more on a given day than people who answered ‘somewhat true.’

In sum, both types of reasons to help were independent elements in helping others. Both want-to and have-to reasons to help led to more acts of kindness and to more effort invested in helping others. The more someone endorsed helping for its own sake the more time they spent helping and the more someone endorsed helping out of obligation the more money they spent on helping, but in the end, both were linked to more resources being devoted on other people.

Thus, the people who help the most and in a range of ways in their daily lives (such as  giving both their time and their money) are likely those who help for multiple reasons. There is no bad reason to be kind!


For Further Reading

Peetz, J., & Milyavskaya, M. (2021). A self-determination theory approach to predicting daily prosocial behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 45(5), 617-630. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09902-5
 

Johanna Peetz is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research includes a range of topics connected to decision making across domains of personal spending, time perception, and interpersonal relationships. 

 

Does Danger Level Affect Bystanders’ Intervention in Real-life Conflicts?

Imagine witnessing a fight when walking home from a night out. If you would intervene in the conflict, at what point would you do so? Would danger make you more or less compelled to take action?

The Bystander Effect

The “bystander effect” is a classical hypothesis of social psychology, suggesting that the likelihood of a bystander to intervene in an emergency decreases with an increasing number of other bystanders present. Surprising though this may sound, it is indeed sometimes true. However, recent evidence finds that emergency dangerousness can reduce or even reverse this effect—because danger removes the ambiguity of whether someone needs help, and in a dangerous situation the presence of other bystanders makes intervening feel safer. The level of danger considered in previous research is low, however, given that the bystander effect has mainly been tested in experimental settings where serious danger cannot be created. Therefore, it remains unclear how serious danger, as observed in real-life public assaults, influences bystander intervention.

Using Real-Life Conflicts

We examined the influence of danger on bystander intervention using public surveillance cameras in nightlife and tourist areas of three different cities: Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Lancaster (England), and Cape Town (South Africa). This footage allowed us to observe real-life conflicts that had varying levels of dangerousness. We defined dangerousness  as aggression level, with a low level including aggressive gesturing, medium level including punches, kicks, and shoves, and high level including weapon use or aggression towards a person on the ground. We systematically observed the behaviour of the bystanders, selecting the first person who intervened in a conflict, and measuring the different aggressive behaviors second-by-second throughout the conflict.

As illustrated by the photos below, you see on the first photo that the conflicts starts, with the man in the white and black shirt gesturing aggressively (level 1 aggression). On the second photo the men start punching each other (level 2 aggression), and you see the bystanders watching. On the third photo the severity increases as one of the conflict parties hits the ground while the other starts kicking (level 3 aggression). That is the moment where one of the bystanders (the man in a black jacket) runs towards the conflict and pulls the conflict parties apart along with two women, visible on the fourth photo.

photo of man in white and black shirt gesturing aggressively

photo of men punching each other with bystanders watching

photo showing one of the conflict parties hitting the ground while the other starts kicking

where one of the bystanders (the man in a black jacket) runs towards the conflict and pulls the conflict parties apart along with two women

We found that a bystander intervention was 19 times more likely when conflict parties displayed aggression than when no aggression was displayed (intervention in photo two but not in one). Further, we found that an increasing intensity of aggression neither facilitated nor deterred bystander intervention (intervention as likely in photo two as in photo three). This suggests that it is the qualitative shift from no danger to dangerous aggression—rather than the intensity of the danger—that underpins the decision to intervene. Finally, bystander gender and the number of bystanders present were not found to alter this danger effect.

Because of our use of public surveillance footage, our results offer compelling evidence that danger facilitates intervention in real-life public conflicts. From the perspective of the bystanders, the good news is that intervention carries little risk for the bystanders themselves. In a previous study, analyzing the video sample, we found that bystanders rarely get victimized when intervening, and if they do, the severity is typically low, for example a light push or hit (Liebst et al. 2020).


For Further Reading

Liebst, L. S., Philpot, R., Levine, M., and Lindegaard, M. R. (2020) Would I be hurt? Cross-national CCTV footage shows low victimization risk for bystander interveners in public conflicts. Psychology of Violence. DOI: 10.1037/vio0000299

Lindegaard, M. R., Liebst, L. S., Philpot, R., Levine, M., & Bernasco, W. (2021). Does danger level affect bystander intervention in real-life conflicts? Evidence from CCTV footage. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211042683.

Philpot, R., Liebst, L. S., Levine, M., Bernasco, W. and Lindegaard, M. R. (2019) Would I be helped if victimized in public? Cross-national study of CCTV data shows that intervention is the norm in real-life public conflicts. American Psychologist, 75(1), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000469
 

Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard is an anthropologist, a professor of sociology at University of Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR). Her research is on interactional aspects of offending, victimization, guardianship and law enforcement, street culture, and observational methods.

Lasse Suonperä Liebst is a social-behavioral scientist, an associate professor at University of Copenhagen, and senior research fellow at the NSCR. His research is on face-to-face behaviour, interpersonal violence, bystander helping, and video observational methods.

Richard Philpot is a lecturer of social psychology and behavioural analytics at the Lancaster University. His research is on psychological and behavioural responses to public emergencies and high stress situations.

Mark Levine is a professor of social psychology at Lancaster University. His research is on social identity, group processes, and prosocial and anti-social behavior.

Wim Bernasco is a psychologist, senior researcher at the NSCR, and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research is on the geography of crime, offender decision making and situational causes of crime.

 

Marlone D. Henderson

Marlone D. Henderson is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. from Michigan State University and his Ph.D. from New York University. Dr. Henderson aims to understand the role basic cognitive processes play in promoting social harmony, and his research focuses on three domains: social conflict, social judgments, and prosocial behavior.


Do you have a favorite SPSP conference memory or story?

Presenting my first poster, which was my honor's thesis (examining the effects of learning versus performance goals on systematic versus  heuristic processing).  I was convinced that no one would find the topic interesting, or worse, that someone would come along and say that my idea had already been published. Several folks stopped by and I found the whole experience exhilarating.


Can you recall a moment, experience or person that influenced you or led you to decide that personality and social psychology was the path for you?

Lawrence Messe (an undergraduate social psychology instructor and my thesis advisor) and Norbert Kerr (head of the first social psych lab that I worked in).


How has your identity affected your career?

I identify as biracial, and for much of my adolescent and adult life I have shifted between the perspective of a majority versus minority group. I believe this experience has contributed to perspective taking in my research and teaching.


What are your current research interests?

Prosocial modeling in a group setting, following up on a paper my colleagues and I published (Henderson, M.D., Huang, S.C., & Chang, C.C.A., 2012). When others cross psychological distance to help: Highlighting prosocial actions toward outgroups encourages philanthropy (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, pp. 220-225). I'm developing a theory that aims to present a comprehensive framework for how people's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are affected when they learn of others who engage in between-group versus within-group helping.


What is a recent journal article you recently read and would recommend (and why)?

Nelson-Coffey, S.K., Fritz, M.M., Lyubomirsky, S., & Cole, S. (2017). Kindness in the blood: A randomized controlled trial of the gene regulatory impact of prosocial behavior (Psychoneuroendocrinology, 81 [2017], pp. 8-13), because of their inclusion of so many different, useful comparison groups and their ability to explain and show how prosocial behavior could cause changes in health.


What is the best book you’ve read or TV show or movie you’ve watched recently?

The best book that I've read recently was The Dry by Jane Harper. It's pretty dark, but a real page turner! 

 

The Psychology of Live Theatre: Can Seeing Theatre Increase Empathy?

While some theatres are beginning to open this fall, much of the world has spent a year and a half without live theatre because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many theatre artists are currently unemployed, and without funding, some theatres will struggle to survive past the pandemic.

Why do we need live theatre? Many artists suggest that theatre can improve empathy for those who are different from ourselves, but until recently, there has been little research on the psychology of attending live shows. This is surprising, since theatre has been a major part of our lives both recently and throughout history. For example, before the pandemic, according to Americans for the Arts, about 44 million Americans attended non-profit theatres in the United States each year.

My colleagues and I set out to investigate the effects of attending live theatre.

We collaborated with two theatre companies—the Public Theatre in New York and Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon—to measure the effects of attending three different plays: Skeleton Crew, written by Dominque Morisseau, Wolf Play by Hansol Jung, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning play Sweat by Lynn Nottage. These plays covered different themes that could be expected to evoke concern about social issues: Skeleton Crew was about auto workers in Detroit after the 2008 financial crisis, Wolf Play was about a same-sex couple trying to adopt a child, and Sweat was about working-class factory workers in Detroit.

We surveyed over 1,600 audience members either immediately before or immediately after watching these plays (alternating every other night). In these surveys, we asked about their empathy toward groups depicted in the plays. Specifically, we asked about their ability to take the perspective of groups in the shows, as well as how much they felt concern and compassion for groups in the shows—both of which are considered to be components of the umbrella term “empathy.” Additionally, we asked people about their beliefs about political issues related to the plays—such as income inequality for Skeleton Crew, or attitudes about same-sex parents for Wolf Play.

We also measured whether these plays increased charitable donations. We entered all participants in a lottery to receive a gift card, but also gave participants the opportunity to donate a proportion of this reward to a charity related to the play, as well as a charity unrelated to the play.

After—as opposed to before—seeing the plays, audience members reported feeling more empathy toward the groups of people depicted in them—in other words, they felt like they could take the perspective of groups of people in the play and felt more compassion for them. Additionally, audience members after the show reported more concern for socio-political issues related to the themes of the play. Seeing theatre also led the post-show group to donate more to charity as compared to the pre-show group—whether or not the charity was related to the themes in the play. That is intriguing, because it means theatre may increase generous behavior about issues unrelated to the specific themes explored in the play they just saw.

These effects correlated with how “transported” people felt by the plays. In other words, people who felt more “immersed” or “lost” in the narrative of the plays reported higher levels of empathy, agreement with attitudes related to the show, and donated more to charity.

Given the tens of millions of people who see theatre across the globe every year, we believe that even a small increase in empathy and generosity among theatre-goers can make a sizable impact in creating a more compassionate society.

Our findings build on past research about the effects of other art forms. For instance, other studies show that taking acting classes or reading works of fiction can improve empathy.

Since we published these studies, we have been delighted by the positive responses that we have received from the theatre community. For instance, we recently held an online conversation with Hamilton star Phillipa Soo discussing this study, as well as theatre and empathy more broadly. Many theatre artists believe that the work they do has important social impact, and we hope our study helps demonstrate that impact.

In a time when theatre is struggling, and when arts funding or arts programs in schools are being threatened, it is necessary to provide scientific evidence on the benefits of the arts. While arts funding is often perceived as a luxury, our studies point to the tangible benefits of art forms like live theatre. We hope studies like ours will inspire future collaborations between artists and scientists to understand the role of the arts in society.


For Further Reading

Rathje, S., Hackel, L., & Zaki, J. (2021). Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104138

Goldstein, T. R., & Winner, E. (2012). Enhancing empathy and theory of mind. Journal of Cognition and Development13(1), 19-37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2011.573514

Dodell-Feder, D., & Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social   cognition: A meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11),          1713-1727. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000395
 

Steve Rathje is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, where he studies as a Gates scholar. He has published studies on topics such as the arts, social media, and polarization. You can follow him on Twitter @steverathje2.

 

How Do Infants Help? Let Me Count the Ways


Kids love to help. Indeed, they will go out of their way to do so, even when their earnest efforts are inefficient or ineffective. Imagine the child who tries to help clean up, who just makes an even bigger mess in the process. But how and when infants help is less understood. Our research considered different ways that kids help, the situations in which helping occurs, and how such behaviors vary with age.

While helping is always about meeting the needs of another person, how and when helping happens can vary.

When researchers write about infant and child helping, they (perhaps inevitably) produce a jumble of terms and ways to define helping. What one researcher terms “helping,” another might label “problem solving,” “sharing,” or “distraction.” So for our research, we created order by grouping the studies into three types:

  • Meeting the concrete need of another person, such as picking up a pen that they have dropped—this is called instrumental helping.
  • Comforting, as in providing a hug or tender affection to make someone feel better.
  • Indirect helping, which happens when there may be nothing that one can do directly, but one can help indirectly by soliciting others to remedy the situation.

We were also curious if infants would help in a variety of emotional contexts. Researchers have typically observed how infants help people who are sad or distressed. However, helping can also occur in response to other emotions. For example, I may try shoo away a spider if it is scaring you (instrumental helping), console you when you are irritated (comforting), or inform the waiter that you would prefer a different dish to eat (indirect helping).

How We Looked at These Questions

Our research therefore looked at the three forms of helping and the emotional contexts infants were in when they helped. Infants aged 16-, 19-, and 24-months interacted with an adult who expressed either joy, sadness, fear, anger, or disgust toward a toy. We then observed how infants responded toward the emotional adult and noted their different forms of helping. Our analyses compared the rates of each type of infant helping across age groups and emotional contexts.

Importantly, we classified the infant behaviors by their function (what the infant was attempting to accomplish) rather than their form (that is, a specific behavior to complete that goal). This unique approach provided flexibility in the type of behavior that an infant could use (such as  hugging, patting on the back, soothing words) to achieve a particular type of helping goal (for example, comforting).

The infants showed us quite a repertoire of different kinds of helping, and these were attuned to the particular needs of the emotional adult. For example, instrumental helping (34%) was more common when the adult was sad than when she expressed other emotions (ranging from 19% to 2%). And, as you might expect, the repertoire became more advanced in the older infants. The 24-month-old infants were more likely to provide help (33%) than the 19-month-olds (20%) and 16-month-olds (15%). The 19- and 24-month-old infants were also more likely to offer indirect helping than the younger age group, typically by attempting to solicit the parent to help the emotional adult.

Additionally, and somewhat surprisingly, 35% of the oldest infants helped even when the adult was expressing joy. This may indicate that these infants were engaging in a play-based script of providing help. Practicing how to help in playful settings may be one way that infants practice and fine-tune their helping behaviors.

Helping others is crucial for being a social partner and for developing social relationships. Our study showcases the variety of ways that infants help, when they use various helping strategies, and how these behaviors change as they develop.

So, the next time that you offer help to another person, think about how and why you are doing so. You may just find that your helping behavior is as complex and nuanced as a 2-year-old’s.


For Further Reading

Padilla-Walker, L. M., & Carlo, G. (2014). The study of prosocial behavior: Past, present, and future. In L. M. Padilla-Walker & G. Carlo (Eds.), Prosocial development: A multidimensional approach (pp. 3–16). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199964772.003.0001

Paulus, M. (2018). The multidimensional nature of early prosocial behavior: A motivational perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, 20, 111–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.09.003

Walle, E. A., Reschke, P. J., Main, A., & Shannon, R. M. (2020). The effect of emotional communication on infants' distinct prosocial behaviors. Social Development29(4), 1092-1114.


Eric Walle is Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of California, Merced. He is the Director of the Interpersonal Development Lab and Co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development.

 

How to Decide Who Will Help Us?


Imagine moving to a new apartment in a foreign city. You bought a table and now you need to assemble it. You find this task rather difficult to do alone. You need someone to help you. But who? You don't know anyone nearby. When you moved in, you met the people in the two apartments next to you. In one apartment lives a young man who has a square jaw, high forehead, and heavy eyebrows, features that you associate with dominance. By contrast, the person in the other apartment has a rounded face, large eyes, thin eyebrows—a babyface—thus he appears more submissive. Which of these two will you ask to help you? How, if at all, does their appearance influence your decision?

We are advised to not “judge a book by its cover,” that is, to not judge others based on their appearance. Yet, one reason for this advice is that in fact, we often do just that. As a result, we also react to a dominant-appearing person quite differently than we react to someone who appears to be submissive. In our research, we tested if people judge the willingness of a person to agree to help a stranger who asks for help, based on how dominant or submissive the prospective helper appears to be. In addition, we explored the influence of the appearance of the person asking for help.

Dominant and submissive appearance are relevant in this situation because these characteristics are associated with attributes that are relevant both to someone seeking another’s help and the potential helper. First, dominant people are assumed to be more competent than submissive people. It is reasonable to assume that when you seek someone’s help you would like your helper to be competent and hence likely more effective. Yet, the fact that the potential helper is competent is an advantage only if this person is willing to give us a hand. In other words, when we ask someone for help we need to estimate the likelihood that they actually will help. And since dominant people are also perceived as less approachable than submissive ones, they may also be seen as less likely to agree to help.

At the same time, how submissive or dominant the person seeking help appears to be may also matter in this scenario. On one hand, people who appear submissive seem less competent and are expected to be more in need of help, hence a potential helper might feel obliged to help. On the other hand, people who seem dominant are the kind of people that are more likely to get what they asked of others. Hence, they may be perceived as ones whose request for help will not be denied.

In our research, participants saw photographs of two men or two women. One was described as seeking help and the other as the potential helper. In some photos, both helper and help-seeker appeared either dominant or submissive, or one had a dominant and the other a submissive appearance. Participants recruited from a crowdsourcing panel first read a story in which a person seeks help and then guessed how likely is the help-seeker to ask the potential helper for help, and how likely is the potential helper to help if asked.

We used different scenarios to describe different help situations. Help was required either to assemble furniture, to find technical information, or to obtain a loan. These contexts were chosen because they involve different forms of effort from the helper. What we found was that in all help domains, the submissive person was judged as the one more likely to agree to help if asked to do so.

Participants also saw submissive appearing people as more caring and helpful by nature. Thus, people prefer potential kindness over competence when it comes to seeking help. However, the dominant or submissive appearance of the person seeking help was not important for judgments of help likelihood or asking for help. In a follow-up study, participants also reported preferring to ask for help from a submissive person when they themselves needed help.

Thus, although we are advised to not judge people by appearance, we seem to make important decisions such as whom to ask for help based on the appearance of the potential helpers. In other domains such as risk-taking tendencies, judgments of dominant people are quite aligned with how dominant people perceive themselves. It is possible that in this context also, people have a rather good sense of the actual likelihood that a dominant-looking or submissive-looking person will help them.  


For Further Reading

Hareli, S., Smoly, M., & Hess, U. (2018). Help me Obi-Wan; The influence of facial dominance on perceptions of helpfulness. Social Influence, 13(3), 163-176. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2018.1500944


Shlomo Hareli is an Israeli psychologist, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Business Administration at the University of Haifa. His research focuses on the social perception of emotions.

Michael Smoly is an Israeli electrical engineer serving as Quality Assurance Manager at INSIGHTEC. Hand in hand with this position, he studied at the Department of Business Administration at the University of Haifa and earned a PhD in business administration.

Ursula Hess is a German psychologist who teaches at the Humboldt-University of Berlin as Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology. Her research on the communication of emotions. 

 

Envy Hurts Not Only Us but Also Those Around Us

Feeling envious is not a pleasant experience: we feel as though we are lacking something, and this can often make us feel inferior to other people. But the negative effects of envy may extend beyond how we feel to have an impact on our relationships with other people. In fact, there’s reason to think that the negative experience of envy can lower people’s willingness to help others and maybe even make people more likely to harm others.

My colleagues and I conducted two studies in which we had people recall a specific memory from their life and write about it. Some of the people were told to write about a time they felt envious, and some of the people were told to write about a time they felt grateful. We chose gratitude as a comparison emotion because it is the opposite of envy; whereas we feel envious when we don’t have something we want, we feel grateful for something we have, and that positive emotion often extends to others. We also had some people write about a neutral topic such as a trip to the grocery store or what was in the room around them so that we could also compare the negative and positive emotions of envy and gratitude to a neutral experience.

In the first study, we found that participants who were feeling envious were less likely to help a stranger. We set up situation where a researcher posing as another participant dropped a canister of pencils near our participant so we could record how much the participant helped pick up the pencils, if at all. Despite the fact that that the pencils were dropped right next to our participants, envious people were less likely to help and also picked up fewer pencils even when they did!

In the second study, we set up a situation where participants had the opportunity to assign puzzle tasks to another person, believing that the other person had to complete the task in a short amount of time to earn a reward. Thus, we could measure participants’ tendency to harm other people by the difficulty of the puzzles they assigned to the other person; harder puzzles would reduce the other person’s chance to perform well and get a reward. It turned out that envious participants were more likely to assign difficult puzzles to the other person. They were even more likely to admit to doing it because they wanted to hurt the person’s chances of earning the reward.

Our research was among the first to experimentally examine the behavioral effects of envy and highlighted the effects of this negative emotion not only for the person who feels envious but also for those around them. Envy can negatively affect how we feel toward others and how we treat them, suggesting that this emotion has far more impact than previously thought.


For Further Reading

Behler, A.M.C., Wall, C.S.J., Bos, A., & Green, J.D. (2020). To help or not to help?: Assessing the impact of envy on prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(7), 1156-1168.

 

Anna Maria C. Behler is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. She studies how emotions like envy, nostalgia, and empathy influence our relationships and behaviors.

 

Erin Heerey

Erin Heerey is an Associate Professor at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the biological underpinnings of social behaviour, social difficulties in clinical populations, and how people use and understand social cues during face-to-face interactions.
 

What tactics or methods do you like to employ in order to get your students to think creatively about research?

It is hard to make people think creatively. So I tend to take the easy road and instead select students based on their ability to think creatively. That means I don't always select the students who look best on paper. Instead, I focus on the smart students who ask the most interesting research questions and who can imagine the work they would need to do to test those ideas. After that, it's just a matter of putting the conditions in place that will allow those students to flourish, grow and learn. 


What are your current research interests?

One of the things I'm most interested in learning is how the brain integrates the huge array of data we acquire during face-to-face social interaction. We are currently working on some new analytic techniques suited to big data with multiple levels of interdependence. This work will help us generate the foundation of a research plan that will allow us to chart the social decisions people make based on how their partners behave. Once we can map the landscape of real social interaction, we can concentrate on how people use those data to understand and connect with others. 


If you could instantly become an expert at something, what would it be?

Data science! This is an area where the training we get in psychology really falls short - the basic stats I learned during my degrees and the basic stats we teach today are really the tools of the 1930s. As a field, we need to work on improving students' training in data visualization, computer-intensive analysis models, social network and big data analysis, model selection/validation, and the tools psychological scientists need to begin making formal predictions of their theoretical models. 
 

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Beware the sunk cost fallacy! If something you are doing, whether personal or professional, has lost its utility, figure out how to either gain that utility back or find something else to do instead. Life is so busy that I don't have time to waste on things I don't enjoy. That includes both my work life and my personal life. That doesn't mean that I absolutely enjoy everything I need to do (either at work or at home), but on balance, the equations generally come out in the positive direction. I think that is probably the secret to well-being. 

 

What are three goals that you have for the coming year?

1) Learn enough Python to code my first experiment in that language AND to analyze the data it produces.

2) Submit a registered report of a novel experiment.

3) Hike a section of the Sierra High Route.
 

If you weren’t in your current job, what would you be doing?

I would own a bakery/cafe, specializing in bread, pastries and other delicious high-carb offerings! And coffee. Really good coffee.

 

Are Poor People Actually More Generous?

Warren Buffett has famously pledged to donate 99% of his sizeable wealth to charity. At the same time, people who regularly struggle to make ends meet may think twice before investing $5.00 in Girl Scout cookies. Many people find this pattern quite reasonable: being generous is easier for rich than for poor people.

Against this background, it was quite surprising when a series of studies reported that poor people might actually be more generous and helpful than rich people. In these studies, each research participant was given a small sum of money that they could divide between themselves and another study participant. People who identified themselves as relatively well-off gave less money to the other person than people who identified themselves as relatively poor. Because this was a somewhat surprising finding, we wanted to see whether this result could be confirmed.

To this end, we conducted two direct replication studies. A direct replication is a study that tries to imitate the original study as closely as possible. So, in collaboration with the journal editor and reviewers, we fine-tuned our studies to make sure that they were as well-designed as possible, then collected our data.

In contrast to the original findings, we did not find that poorer people were more generous than wealthy ones. For example, although participants in one of our studies shared about 30% of the money we gave them with the other person, poorer participants did not share more money than wealthy ones did.

Does this mean that affluence isn’t related to the tendency to help other people? Not necessarily.

Even when two studies are very similar, a variety of small differences could explain why they obtained different results. Our studies were conducted at a different time and place than the original studies, and our sample of participants necessarily differed as well. It is impossible to rule out all these factors and to say why exactly we did not replicate the original findings.

 In addition, measuring how altruistic, generous, or helpful people behave is challenging.  Several measures has been developed to measure these kinds of prosocial behaviors, including the method we used in which people share money between themselves and another person. But more research is needed to evaluate and improve the measurement tools we use before drawing strong conclusions about the relationship between affluence and altruism.

So, at present, people should be careful when drawing conclusions about the relationship between economic affluence and generosity. We simply do not have good evidence to assume that wealthy people are more selfish than poor people. Until we have stronger support for this assumption, perhaps we should put it on the list of things that we know that we don’t know.  


For Further Reading

Piff, P. K., Kraus, M. W., Coˆte´, S., Cheng, B. H., & Keltner, D. (2010). Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 771–784.

Stamos A., Lange F., Szu-chi H. & Dewitte S. (2020). Having less, giving more? Two preregistered studies of the relationship between social class and prosocial behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 84, 103902.


Angelos Stamos is a postdoctoral researcher in the BEE - Behavioral Engineering Group at KU Leuven (Belgium), specializing in topics such as resource scarcity and self-control.

Florian Lange is a postdoctoral researcher in the BEE - Behavioral Engineering Group at KU Leuven, where he focuses on the study of pro-environmental behavior.

Siegfried Dewitte is a professor of consumer behavior in the BEE - Behavioral Engineering Group at KU Leuven, specializing in understanding and engineering self-control, altruism, and pro-environmental behavior.

“Let’s Stay Safe; Please Keep Your Distance”: How to Politely Ask Other People to Maintain Social Distance

Social distancing can create many social dilemmas.  One of them is how to ask other people to keep their distance in public spaces. Asking others, especially strangers, to keep a safe distance away from you may not always be easy. In fact, such a request recently resulted in a violent altercation in which a women was attacked for asking someone  to keep their distance.   Although violent reactions may be rare, people may feel some awkwardness, if not trepidation, when  asking others to maintain a safe distance.

One of the reasons for this is that we are socialized to avoid imposing on others, especially people  we don’t know.  Normally, we aren’t supposed to go around asking—or, worse, telling—strangers to behave in certain ways, and doing so can seem rude, disrespectful, or even threatening. However, how others react to  a request depends on the way we ask. We can use several  linguistic strategies  to make requests, strategies that differ in terms of their clarity as well as their level of  rudeness or imposition.

In choosing what strategy to use, we face  a tradeoff between being clear in our request and seeming to be offensive, imposing, or threatening.  The clearer our request, the more imposing, off-putting, or threatening it may sound.  But if we try to not to come on too strong, our request may be less clear.  

For example, the least threatening request strategy is to provide some sort of hint about what you want the other person to do, hoping that the recipient will recognize the intended meaning. For example, “It’s warm in here” can function as a request to turn down the thermostat, but the other person may interpret it as a simple observation about the temperature rather than a request to turn the heat down.  In terms of social distancing, one could hint with something like “I think you might be too close to me,” but this strategy can backfire  because some people may not recognize the intended meaning. On the other hand, the most direct—and most threatening—strategy is to explicitly say “Turn down the thermostat.” With social distancing, a direct strategy would be to say something like “Keep your distance” or “Stay 6 feet away from me.”  Although the meaning is certainly clear, you risk  offending the other person. 

Instead of these two extreme strategies, research suggests that the optimal strategy, at least in most Western cultures, is to seek a middle ground and use some form of what is termed “positive politeness.” Positive politeness is relatively direct but simultaneously emphasizes solidarity, or closeness, with the other person.  And it can be combined with more direct forms of requests to create an optimal message frame. 

Consider the statement, “Let’s be safe! Please keep your distance.”  The positive politeness component, “Let’s be safe,” emphasizes a mutual goal rather than just your own  individual desire.  So, rather than requesting the other person to do something that you want, you are asserting a mutual goal—let’s both be safe. Including  the direct statement,  “Keep your distance,” combined with the politeness marker, “Please,” then makes your request  clear, but in a polite way.

So, combining positive politeness with a direct request provides an optimal balance between maximizing clarity and minimizing offensiveness to the other person.  Give positive politeness a try the next time that stranger gets too close.


For Further Reading

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holtgraves, Thomas. (2001) Language as social action: Social psychology and language use. Erlbaum


Thomas Holtgraves is a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University where he conducts research on various aspects of language use.