I need help summarizing this. From: Social Psychology Tenth Edition...

I need help summarizing this. From: Social Psychology Tenth Edition by Elliot Aronson. 

"What can we do to get people to help those in need? Before addressing this question, we should point out that people do not always want to be helped. Imagine that you are sit- ting in a coffee shop and are trying to figure out how to upload a video from your phone to a new social media site. You're having trouble getting it to work when a guy you know saunters over, looks over your shoulder for a few minutes and then says, "You have a lot to learn. Let me show you how to do it." How would you react? You might feel gratitude, but you will probably also feel some resentment. His offer of help comes with a message: "You are too stupid to figure this out for yourself." Because receiving help can make people feel inadequate and dependent, they do not always react positively when someone offers them aid. People do not want to appear incompetent, so they often decide to suffer in silence, even if doing so lowers their chances of successfully complet- ing a task (Alvarez & Van Leeuwen, 2011; Halabi, Nadler, & Dovidio, 2013).

Nevertheless, the world would be a better place if more people helped those in need. How can we increase everyday acts of kindness, such as looking out for an elderly neighbor or volunteering to read to kids at the local school? The answer to this question lies in our discussion of the causes of prosocial behavior. For example, we saw that several personal characteristics of potential helpers are important, and promoting those factors can increase the likelihood that these people will help (Clary et al., 1994; Snyder, 1993). But even kind, altruistic people will fail to help if certain sit- uational constraints are present, such as being in an urban environment or witnessing an emergency in the presence of numerous bystanders.

Increasing the Likelihood That Bystanders Will Intervene

There is evidence that simply being aware of the barriers to helping in an emergency can increase people's chances of overcoming those barriers. A few years ago at Cornell University, several students intervened to prevent another student from committing suicide. As is often the case with emergencies, the situation was very confusing, and at first the bystanders were not sure what was happening or what they should do. The student who led the intervention said that she was reminded of a lecture she had heard on bystander intervention in her introductory psychology class a few days before and realized that if she didn't act, no one would (Savitsky, 1998). Or consider an incident at Vassar College not long ago where students saw someone being attacked by a mugger. As so often happens with incidents like this, most of the bystanders did nothing, probably because they assumed that somebody else had already called the police. One of the students, however, immediately called the campus police because she was struck by how similar the situation was to the studies on bystander intervention she had read about in her social psychology course—even though she had taken the class more than a year earlier (Coats, 1998).

These are not controlled experiments, of course, and we cannot be certain that these helpful people were spurred on by what they had learned in their psychology classes. Fortunately, this question has been addressed experimentally (Beaman et al., 1978). The researchers randomly assigned students to listen to a lecture about Latané and Darley's (1970) bystander intervention research or a lecture on an unrelated topic. Two weeks later, all the students participated in what they thought was a completely unrelated sociology study, during which they came across a student lying on the floor. Was he in need of help? Had he fallen and injured himself, or was he simply a stu- dent who had fallen asleep after pulling an all-nighter? As we have seen, when in an ambiguous situation such as this one, people look to see how other people are react- ing. Because an accomplice of the experimenter (posing as another participant) inten- tionally acted unconcerned, the natural thing to do was to assume that nothing was wrong. This is exactly what most participants did if they had not heard the lecture about bystander intervention research; in this condition, only 25% of them stopped to help the student. However, if the participants had heard the lecture about bystander intervention, 43% stopped to help the student. Thus, knowing how we can be unwit- tingly influenced by others can by itself help overcome this type of social influence and make us more likely to intervene in a possible emergency.

Would it help to train people more broadly to "not be a bystander" and help when needed? Consider, for example, the all-too-common problem of violence in our society, including sexual violence, bullying, and stalking. Many of us have probably had the experience of seeing someone who might be at risk for such violence but we failed to intervene, because we weren't sure what to do or because there were lots of other peo- ple available to help. Suppose, for example, that you are at a college party and see a man gripping a woman by the arm and leading her out of the room. She doesn't seem to be leaving voluntarily, or is she? It's probably OK, you think. After all, no one else is doing anything about it. The man is probably a friend of the woman's and is helping her home because she has had too much to drink.

But by now you know that the other bystanders might be in the same position as you, failing to help because they don't see anyone else reacting with alarm (including you!). And now that you know about the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibil- ity, we hope you are more likely to jump in and ask the woman if she is OK.

Indeed, this is the premise behind bystander intervention training programs such as Green Dot—that people can be trained to be better bystanders by understanding the difficulties of helping in situations such as the one we just described. Many colleges have adopted programs such as this, and although they are new, there is some initial evidence that they work. In one study, for example, researchers tracked the incidence of sexual violence in 26 high schools, after randomly assigning half of them to get Green Dot bystander intervention training and half to a control group that did not get the training. Over a 5-year period, there were significantly fewer reports of sexual violence in the schools that got the training (Coker et al., 2017).

Another approach is simply to remind ourselves that it can be important to overcome our inhibitions and do the right thing. When people find themselves in situations that are surprising and difficult to understand—which is certainly the case when emergencies arise—they naturally "freeze" and try to make sense of what is happening around them (van den Bos & Lind, 2013). This is particularly likely to happen when people are in public and worry about "doing the wrong thing" in front of others.

Maybe people who are concerned about doing the wrong thing in public would be more likely to help if they thought about times in the past when they overcame their inhibitions. To test that hypothesis, Kees van den Bos and colleagues (2009) asked people to fill out one of two versions of a questionnaire. In the disinhibition condition, people wrote about times when they had acted in an uninhibited way despite what other people thought. In the control condition, people wrote about how they behaved on normal days. Next the researchers staged a helping situation to see which group of people was most likely to come to the aid of someone in need. As they predicted, it was the people in the disinhibition condition. In one study, for example, 53% of individuals who had filled out the disinhibition questionnaire helped a man pick up pens that he dropped as he was rushing to catch a train, compared to only 7% of individuals in the control condition. As natural as it is to hang back and do nothing in situations such as this one, reminding ourselves of times in the past when we overcame our inhibitions can make us more likely to help (Van den Bos & Lind, 2013).

Increasing Volunteerism

There are many important kinds of prosocial behavior besides intervening in emer- gencies, including volunteerism and community service. Social psychologists have studied this kind of helping as well, wherein people commit to helping strangers on a more long-term basis (Johnson & Post, 2017; Mannino, Snyder, & Omoto, 2011; Piliavin, 2010).

Surveys of Western European and North American countries have found that many people engage in volunteer work, with the highest rate in the United States (47%; Ting & Piliavin, 2000). This level of volunteerism is a tremendous source of support for many members of our society, including children, the homeless, immi- grants, and many others. It is also a great source of support for those doing the vol- unteering (Layous et al., 2017). Older adults who engage in volunteer work, have better health, less depression, and even a longer life (Anderson et al., 2014). These benefits are so substantial that some medical professionals have argued that doc- tors should prescribe two hours a week of volunteer behavior to all their patients (Johnson & Post, 2017). Similar to our previous discussion of empathy and helping, volunteerism is a case where there are benefits both to the helper and those being helped.

Because of this, some institutions have responded by requiring their members to perform community service. Some high schools, colleges, and businesses, for exam- ple, require their students or employees to engage in volunteer work. These programs have the benefit of increasing the pool of volunteers available to help community orga- nizations such as homeless shelters, medical clinics, and day-care centers.

But the question arises as to the effect of such "mandatory volunteerism" on the motivation of the people who do the helping. As we discussed in Chapter 5, giving people strong external reasons for performing an activity can actually undermine their intrinsic interest in that activity. This is called the overjustification effect: People see their behavior as caused by compelling extrinsic reasons (e.g., being required to do volunteer work), making them underestimate the extent to which their behavior was caused by intrinsic reasons (e.g., that they like to do volunteer work). Consistent with this research, the more that people feel they are volunteering be- cause of external requirements, the less likely they are to volun- teer freely in the future (Bringle, 2005; Kunda & Schwartz, 1983; Stukas, Snyder, & Clary, 1999). The moral? It is best to encourage people to volunteer while at the same time preserving the sense that they freely choose to do so. Under these conditions volun- teering will increase people's well-being and their intentions to volunteer again in the future (Piliavin, 2008; Stukas et al., 1999)."