Year 2 Essay 1 (Plan and Example): Critically evaluate whether people are truly altruistic
Essay Plan
Essays plans are far from perfect. This is an example of an essay plan that does not follow PESEL (Point, Explain, Support Evidence, Link)very well. It does however contain good reference to theory, research and applications.
Introduction (150 words)
What is altruism
What the theories are about?
What kind of evidence will be used?
Do people really help selflessly?
Paragraph 1. 200 words
1. Kate Genovese (context)
2. What kind of approach is that what is the bystander effect?
3. Types of evidence: the reproduction of different experiments
4. Applications of the research- how effective the research is
5. How valid the research is? Motivations for helping selflessly,
Paragraph 2. 200 words
1. Piliavin et el.
2. Instead of asking why people don’t help, we should ask why people help
3. The arousal response (emotional component/ defence reaction)
4. CCTV cameras (night-time economy behaviour)
5. The effect of the number of bystanders over the outcome of an aggression
6. What is the validity of something like this?
7. What is the effectiveness?
8. What are the applications to real life situations: ex: advice given to the police
Paragraph 3. 200 words
1. People do help depending on the group to which they belong
2. What are the research in this regard and what they are telling us?
3. Levine et. al. (2011)
4. Studied the bystander effect using a different approach: social identity between who’s helping and who is not offering the help.
5. The shift of identity between being a fan of Manchester United or between being a football fan. How did the helping change in the 2 situations?
6. Why is this experiment important?
7. Application of something like this What do we find out about the bystander effect and group identity?
Paragraph 4
1. Nativism/ Empiricism-what is it telling us if people help selflessly (from here references to some cultural differences between people) cultural variations in morality
2. Method: the use of a questionnaire: is this method valid? Effective, differences between attitudes and behaviour? The couple who was helped by Americans (critical evaluation)
3. What is it telling us about helping? Helping selflessly
Paragraph 5
1. How helping is tested at different ages
2. Bloom experiment
3. What is the method used, what is it telling us about the babies?
4. Critical evaluation: is the behaviour selfless or is the behaviour the result of positive reinforcement.
Paragraph 6
Human diversity
1. The selfish Gene or that the humans are progressive, and that the society is becoming increasingly peaceful
2. Psychopaths who do good things: is it selflessly motivated
3. How the sense of morality and altruistic behaviour is dependent on certain brain structures.
4. Why such a discussion is important
Conclusion
1. Helping is something that helps people make sense of the world
2. Competitiveness as an individual or as a species
Essay
Critically evaluate whether people are truly altruistic
Note to the reader: Please remember that the essay is published work and partial reproduction (5 or more consecutive words) might be considered plagiarism. Universities have systems in place to ensure that the work of their students is original.
Grade awarded B+
The feedback was constructive and a lot more detailed. The lines below summarises it.
-good structure
-good use of evidence
-good independent study and references
-clear and concise writing
-good critical evaluation but it should have been developed a bit more.
-the first sentence should outline the issue and the terms should be defined after.
-too much focus on altruism. Some reference to selfish behaviour was needed and a bit more critical evaluation.
The distinction between altruism and other prosocial behaviour consists of the fact that the help is given without expecting a reward in return (Manning & Levine, 2015, p. 192). People are motivated to help because they can feel empathy and they are able to take the perspective of the other person (Bierhoff, 2002, p. 9, cited in Manning & Levine, 2015, p. 192). Other definitions, in socio-biology and social psychology, underline the fact that the altruistic behaviour comes at a cost for the benefactor and it offers a survival advantage to the receiver (Coleman, 2015, p. 26). The essay will use an integrative approach, employing arguments from social, developmental, cognitive and biological psychology, showing how using different methodologies researchers draw different conclusions whether humans are genuinely altruistic, or they are selfish. Also, the theories and the research methods will be critically evaluated in terms of how valid and effective they are and ethical considerations about the research of altruism will be taken into account.
Interest in altruistic behaviour was sparked by the news of the tragic case of Kitty Genovese who was murdered in 1984 while 38 witnesses failed to do something about it. Even if researchers were cautious about accepting the information offered by the media as being completely true, the tragic event raised the question of whether people are naturally selfish? Latané and Darley (cited in Manning & Levine, 2015, p. 195) conducted a series of experiments in which the number of participants in a dangerous situation were varied. The conclusion was that the failure to offer help was explained by the diffusion of responsibility called the bystander effect. Over time, other experiments found similar results to the ones obtained by Latané and Darley, that people are less likely to offer help when others are present. The social psychology approach demonstrated that people behave differently when others are present than when they do on their own. Therefore, the likelihood to act in an altruistic way is mediated by the presence of others. Although the findings regarding the bystander effect are valid, the research focused on what the bystander effect is, and it did not offer a solution to how the bystander effect could be avoided or why sometimes people do help.
More recent studies on the bystander effect used CCTV footage to show how the gender and the number of bystanders influence their willingness to help. The research conducted by Levine and Crowther (2008, cited in Manning & Levine, 2015, p. 195) found differences between men and women in their willingness to intervene. Watching footage with gendered violence, women said they were likely to intervene when they were with other women than when they were on their own and men were more likely to help when they were on their own than when others were present. Another study conducted by Levine et al. (2011, Citation, 2018, a) used real CCTV footage depicting nighttime economy in the city centre, characterised by darkness and lots of drunk people. Levine et al. found that the likelihood of an aggressive act to stop depends on the number of bystanders who intervene. When there is one bystander who gets involved, the outcome of the aggression is more likely a negative one, but almost in all cases the aggression is likely to reach a positive outcome when 3 bystanders intervene. The use of CCTV footage does not raise ethical questions as the laboratory and field experiments do and the findings are effective because it shows how dangerous situations can be mediated in future events of aggression.
Another aspect in the study of altruistic behaviour was group identity. People are more likely to behave altruistically towards members of their own group because, from an evolutionary perspective, this type of behaviour increases the chance of survival. Levine et al. (2011) studied how the feeling of belonging to a certain group influences the help offered to a person in need. In an experiment the researchers recruited fans of Manchester United and in one condition they had to perform tasks which made their identity as Manchester United fans more salient, and in another condition their identity as football fans became more prominent. 70% of the participants who identified as football fans offered help to another Manchester United fan, but the help was twice as low when the injured person was wearing a Liverpool tee-shirt or an unbranded one. When the bystanders identified themselves as football fans, they offered help in the same proportion, regardless of what kind of tee shirt the injured person was wearing. The experiment conducted by Levine et al. does not only explain that people are going to act altruistically depending on the identity they belong to but also shows that the identity can also be manipulated. The more integrative an identity people will get, the more likely they are to offer help.
The debate between nativism and empiricism is a long going debate whether people are born with the capacity to act in an altruistic way - nativism or whether people learn how to be fair through the interaction with others – empiricism. In favour of the nativism are the biological arguments. Helping others such as members of the belonging group increase the chances of survival of the helper. But the person offering the help is not necessarily aware of the ‘genetic benefit’ and therefore it does not mean that the altruist is selfishly motivated (Pinker, 2011, p. 704). More recent research supports the argument for a biological cause of the altruistic behaviour. In a controlled experiment, the males who self-administered oxytocin were more likely to take financial decisions favouring their own group than those who were in the placebo condition, who were more likely to act selfishly (Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al., 2010).
The argument for empiricism is offered by developmental psychology and cultural psychology. Jean Piaget in ‘The Moral Development of the child’ (1997, cited in Ibbotson, 2015) used games with marbles to determine how kids make sense of the rules and how they understand the concept of fairness. Piaget proposed the concept of ‘rationalism’, meaning that children learn what is good and bad by themselves. According to Piaget, young children do not understand the concept of fairness because their cognitive functions are not the same as those of an adult and they are not capable of adopting the point of view of the other person. Kohlberg (1969, 1976, cited in Ibbotson, 2015) continued Piaget’s tradition and delimitated 6 stages of morality, from the ‘morality of obedience’ (first stage) to the ‘morality of non-arbitrary social cooperation’ when people cooperate in an impartial and rational way. Contrary to the argument from cognitive psychology used by Piaget and Kohlberg, Paul Bloom and Karen Wynn (Citation, 2018, c) argue that people are born with a sense of good and evil. They designed an experiment where 6-month-old babies watched an interaction between three characters. One of them is playing in a cooperative way and another one is running away with the ball. The findings were that at the end of the play, about 70% of the babies chose the good puppet and 30% chose the bad character. Although it seems that babies have a natural preference for the good character, one explanation is that babies chose to be around people who show a prosocial behaviour.
Other experiments (Warneken et al. 2011cited in Ibbotson, 2015, p. 124) demonstrate that even if young kids are not able to take the perspective of another person they still behave in a fair way. Three-year-old kids do share toys or sweets when they work with other kids to achieve rewards. Still, it is very difficult to assess if the three years olds are genuinely altruistic or if their behaviour is the result of the positive reinforcement for prosocial behaviour, they received from the time they were babies. Most likely, as Knafo et al. (2011) demonstrated, the altruistic behaviour is a combination between genetic heritage and environment. In a study with 168 pair twins, Knafo et al. (2011) showed that the genetics explain between 34% to 53% the prosocial behaviour, while the rest is accounted for by the environment. Moreover, where a specific dopamine receptor (D4, 7 repeat allele) was present, young children were more likely to show prosocial behaviour as a result of positive parenting. All these findings indicate that the young children have a natural ability to be altruistic. Studies with animals illustrate that when the chimpanzees have to cooperate to get a reward, the sharing is done depending on the dominance hierarchy.
In the study of altruism, researchers draw different, sometimes opposing conclusions depending on the theory and methods they used. While the bystander effect was validated by the multitude of experiments conducted in social psychology, it failed to explain why people do help. However, research using real life footage demonstrated that people do help, and that the gender and the number of the participants have an influence on the outcome of the intervention. Levine et al.’s studies demonstrate that many conflicts are solved because of the altruism of passers-by, and that the research of the bystander effect can be done without raising the same ethical questions as experimental designs where participants witness unpleasant situations. On the debate between nativism and empiricism, experiments with babies and young kids as well as strong evidence from biopsychology suggests that unlike animals, the capacity to be altruistic is innate. The essay showed that depending on the situation or the group of belonging, people may choose to act selfishly but there are modalities to help people to behave in a more altruistic way towards members of different groups by making their own group more integrative.