Social Psychology of Helping Relations

Solidarity and Hierarchy

Arie Nadler

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781118521526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología social

Examines the major aspects of giving and receiving help in interpersonal and intergroup relations

This unique book extends the traditional emphasis on interpersonal help-giving in order to consider a wider spectrum of interpersonal and intergroup helping relations. Help giving is viewed as reflecting people's care for others, while at the same time dependency on help and giving help imply lower and higher places on the social hierarchy, respectively. It studies the psychology of what goes into helping someone and integrates experimental work conducted in the social psychological laboratory with applied research from volunteer organizations, schools, and work and family environments. In addition to research on the giving of help, the book considers the recipient of help and reviews research and theory on people's readiness to seek and receive help. Unlike much of past research in this context that has been interested in the "generosity question" (i.e., whether or not people help others) the book considers how different kinds of assistance (i.e., autonomy and dependency-oriented help) shape helping interactions. It then goes beyond the analyses of the immediate helping interaction to consider the long-term consequences of giving and receiving help. Finally, the book addresses theory and research on intergroup helping relations.

Social Psychology of Helping Relations: Solidarity and Hierarchy begins with a general introduction to the topic. It then offers a series of broad perspectives, covering the philosophical and psychological theory, evolution, and overview of social psychological research. Next, the book looks at the social psychology of helping relations, examining the parties involvedt, and the "why" behind their actions. The positives and negatives of giving and receiving assistance, and the links between status and interpersonal and intergroup helping relations are also covered. It considers how giving, seeking and receiving help maintains or challenges status relations between individuals and groups. The book finishes with a conclusion that wraps up the many lessons learned.

• Looks at solidarity and inequality in social interactions
• Examines why people are ready to give and receive help
• Studies the consequences of giving and receiving help
• Highlights important implications to different kinds of help beyond the dichotomy between giving/receiving help or not
• Addresses research and theory on interpersonal and intergroup helping relations
• The implications of helping relations for personal and social change

Social Psychology of Helping Relations: Solidarity and Hierarchy is an ideal book for advanced students, researchers and individuals interested in social psychology, counselling, social work, Sociology, and Political Science.

1
General Introduction

The questions why and when people help or do not help others in need have preoccupied humans since they began carving their thoughts in stone. Religious teachings admonish their adherents to help their fellow human beings, and discussions about human helpfulness and selfishness are pivotal in the writings of Plato, Aristotle (Annas 1977), and Seneca (cf. Griffin 2013), to name a few. The same concern with the reasons and circumstances of helping or failing to help has dominated the writings of more recent philosophers and stimulated the growth of a vibrant field of research in modern social psychology (Dovidio et al. 2006; Keltner et al. 2014). Throughout, these moral teachings, scholarly treatises, and research efforts have centered on the question of generosity, i.e. helping others in need. The present book goes beyond this emphasis on help‐giving to consider the recipient's perspective and the broad spectrum of giving, seeking, and receiving help in interpersonal and intergroup situations.

1.1 Helping Relations: Social Belongingness and Social Hierarchy

The departure point for the present understanding of helping relations is that they reflect the workings of two fundamental human needs: to belong and to be independent. The need for belongingness is reflected in the desire to form and maintain significant social relations (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Helping others in need and relying on their help when we are in need are behavioral expressions of belongingness: they express solidarity, which is the glue that binds people together in relationships and groups. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) attributed people's general need to feel connected to others to the sex drive and processes within the family. Subsequent psychoanalytic approaches placed an even greater emphasis on people's need for belongingness as a central psychological force in life (e.g. Klein 1984). Humanistic psychological theories also emphasized the need to belong. Abraham Maslow (1982), for example, theorized that only existence‐related needs were more primary than people's need for love and belongingness.

Yet alongside the need to belong, people also want to be independent. Independence from significant others such as one's parents is a marker of successful development (Rogoff 2003). People are proud of their achievements when these are individual achievments (McLelland 1967), and self‐reliance is a central value in work and organizational settings (Miller et al. 2002). In fact, because helping is associated with having more skills or resources, giving to others in the group promotes the helper's prestige and status, whereas dependency is considered a marker of one's lower prestige or status. Thus, helping relationships represent a combination of belongingness and hierarchical relations in social interactions.

The duality of these needs is reflected throughout the life cycle. We begin life by being dependent on the caregivers with whom we share belongingness; later, during adolescence, we express a strong need to be independent from them; and in adulthood, the need to belong dominates again as we establish intimate relationships and start new families. In old age, the pendulum swings again and in the face of deteriorating mind and body that make us dependent on others' help, our need to maintain self‐reliance dominates.

The central role of these two needs is echoed in several current social psychological theories. Self‐determination theory posits that people are motivated by three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Ryan and Deci 2000). Although not synonymous with the need for self‐reliance, the needs for autonomy and competence are closely related to it, and the motivation for relatedness parallels the need for belongingness. Research on human values cites benevolence and achievement, paralleling belongingness and independence, respectively, as two basic and universal values (Schwartz 1992). Moreover, the Big Two conceptualization of human motivation regards the needs for communion and agency, corresponding to belongingness and independence, as dominating social life (Abele et al. 2008). Finally, recent research on reconciliation has noted that conflict poses threats to these needs, and that removing these threats increases the prospects of interpersonal and intergroup reconciliation (Nadler and Shnabel 2015; Shnabel and Nadler 2008).

Helping relations are the stage on which the two fundamental needs play out. On the one hand, helping and being helped are the behavioral expressions of belongingness that binds individuals and groups together. On the other hand, being independent in times of need implies that one is strong and competent. Consistent with this, helping others increases the helper's prestige, while depending on others' help is frowned upon (Nadler and Halabi 2015). Thus, while the need for belongingness and communion motivates people to give and receive from others, the need for agency and competence motivates them to remain self‐reliant even in times of adversity, thereby maintaining their place in the social hierarchy as able and competent relative to others.

This dual message has been captured in the poem “Ye Wearie Wayfarer,” by the Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon (1893, p. 28):

Question not, but live and labour

Till yon goal be won,

Helping every feeble neighbour,

Seeking help from none;

Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another's trouble,

Courage in your own.

To overcome people's selfish tendencies, society tells them that they should “help every feeble neighbor,” but to encourage active coping people are told that they should “seek help from none” when they are “feeble.” Therefore, to preserve others' view of them as competent, people often prefer to pay the price of continued hardships rather than receive the help they need to overcome them (Nadler 1986). A new employee may reject an offer of assistance from a colleague in solving a problem he or she cannot solve alone (e.g. Geller and Bamberger 2012); and a student struggling with difficult course material may avoid requesting help from peers or teachers (Karabenick and Gonida 2018), even if this increases the likelihood of failure. Thus, our social nature propels us to help and be helped, while our individual nature leads us to prefer self‐reliance in our time of need.

This theme of helping relationships as reflecting the interplay between people's need to belong and their need to be independent is a powerful undercurrent in social psychological studies of helping. Much of past theory and research has been devoted to the question of generosity, and the first part of the book is accordingly devoted to variables and processes that explain giving help to others in need. Subsequent sections will consider the consequences of giving and receiving help, and the final section will be devoted to research on intergroup helping.

1.2 “Helping” in Social Psychology: Definitions and Concepts

Helping comes in all shapes and sizes. Risking oneself to save a stranger who has fallen on the tracks of an approaching train, spending time to instruct a new employee about organizational politics, and volunteering in soup kitchens for the poor are all examples of helping. These three examples vary, among other things, in the degree of risk involved, the duration of helping, and the decision processes leading to it. Saving another individual from an approaching train is risky, while spending time with a new employee or volunteering to feed the hungry involve little risk, if any. Regarding duration, pulling the fallen person off the tracks may take a few seconds, talking to the new employee might last minutes or hours, and volunteering may represent a commitment of months or even years. Finally, the decision processes involved in each of these three examples are different. Saving a person from the advancing train represents a split‐second decision. If one were to ask the rescuer to describe how he or she had decided to put their life on the line and help, one would likely be told something like “I don't know – I just acted.” The other two examples represent lengthier and more elaborate decision processes. The decision to tell the new employee who should be avoided in the workplace is likely to have come about after some thought, and the decision to volunteer for an extended period is the outcome of an even more complex decision process.

The wide variety of human social behavior that falls under the concept of helping calls for a definition. The need to define “helping” goes beyond what is required by academic conventions. The definition is important because it informs us what is within and what is outside the boundaries of the phenomenon under study. One way of dealing with the complexity of a concept such as helping is to define it broadly. Defining helping as “doing good to others” is an example. This definitional strategy runs the risk of conceptual ambiguity regarding what is not helping (i.e. the danger of “conceptual stretching”; Meierhenrich 2008). In fact, “doing good to others” would include a successful business transaction with another person – after all, by facilitating such a transaction, we “did good” to another. Yet although benevolent intentions may be an important ingredient of successful business deals it is clear that we do not aim to analyze successful business transactions when we consider helping.

The opposite definitional strategy would be to limit the definition to a relatively small set of behaviors. Defining helping as “volunteering in the community” represents such a strategy. Here we run the opposite risk: in the effort to clearly demarcate the phenomenon, we restrict it. Although it is an important topic, the social psychology of helping contains more than research on volunteering. In sum, a definition of helping needs to navigate between the Scylla of conceptual stretching and the Charybdis of conceptual restrictiveness if it is to steer research about helping successfully.

In the present book, we define helpin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgment
• 1 General Introduction
• 2 Broad Perspectives
• 3 Social Psychology of Help‐Giving
• 4 From Help‐Giving to Helping Relations
• 5 Intergroup Helping Relations
• 6 Concluding Comments
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement