Explain prosocial behaviour and aggression, including the factors that influence each.

What this dot point is asking

Social psychology covers not only how others influence us but also two contrasting outcomes of social life: helping and harming. This dot point asks you to explain both prosocial behaviour and aggression and the conditions that shape them.

Prosocial behaviour and altruism

Prosocial behaviour is any voluntary action intended to help another person. Altruism is a special case: helping with no expectation of reward, sometimes at a cost to the helper. Helping is encouraged by empathy, similarity to the person in need, a good mood, and seeing others model helping. It is discouraged by ambiguity about whether help is needed, time pressure and the cost of helping.

The bystander effect

The bystander effect is the finding that the more people present, the less likely any one of them is to help. It is explained by diffusion of responsibility (each person assumes someone else will act) and pluralistic ignorance (people read others' inaction as a sign that no help is needed). Darley and Latane (1968), prompted by the Kitty Genovese case, staged emergencies and found that participants who believed they were the only witness helped fastest and most often, while those who thought others were present helped less and more slowly. They proposed a five-step decision model: notice the event, interpret it as an emergency, take responsibility, decide how to help, and then act.

Explaining aggression

Aggression is behaviour intended to harm another who is motivated to avoid it. The major explanations are:

• Biological: genetic predisposition, hormones such as testosterone, and brain structures such as the amygdala contribute to aggressive responses.
• Social learning (Bandura): aggression is learned by observing and imitating models who are rewarded for it. The Bobo doll study showed children imitated an adult's aggression toward an inflatable doll, and imitated more when the model was rewarded (vicarious reinforcement).
• Frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard and colleagues): frustration, the blocking of a goal, creates a drive toward aggression. The later reformulation by Berkowitz added that frustration produces readiness to aggress, which is more likely to become aggression when aggressive cues (such as weapons) are present.

Reducing aggression and increasing helping

Aggression can be reduced by removing aggressive cues, modelling non-aggressive responses, and teaching emotional regulation. Helping can be increased by reducing ambiguity, naming a specific person to help, and modelling prosocial behaviour, which is why bystander-intervention training teaches people to assign responsibility explicitly.

Putting it together

For helping, explain the influences on prosocial behaviour and use Darley and Latane to show how group size reduces helping through diffusion of responsibility. For aggression, contrast the biological, social-learning and frustration-aggression accounts with their named evidence. Showing that both helping and harming depend on the situation, not just the individual, connects this dot point to the wider lesson of social psychology that the situation has power.