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Prosocial behavior/Keywords/Definitions

From Wikiversity
  • Altruistic helping is when a helper seeks to increase another’s welfare and expects nothing in return.
  • Audience inhibition is failure to help in front of others for fear of feeling like a fool if one’s offer of help is reject.
  • Belief in a just world is the assumption that life is essentially fair, that people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
  • Bystander effect is the finding that people are less likely to offer help when they are in a group than when they are alone.
  • Conformity is going along with the crowd.
  • Cooperation is when each person does his or her part, and together they work toward a common goal.
  • Diffusion of responsibility is the reduction in feeling responsible that occurs when others are present.
  • Egoistic helping is when a helper seeks to increase his or her own welfare by helping another.
  • Empathy is reacting to another person’s emotional state by experiencing the same emotional state.
  • Empathy-altruism hypothesis is the proposition that empathy motivates people to reduce other people’s distress, as by helping or comforting.
  • Forgiveness is ceasing to feel angry toward or seek retribution against someone who has wronged you.
  • Informational social influence is the pressure to accept the actions or statements of others as evidence about reality.
  • Kin selection is the evolutionary tendency to help people who have our genes.
  • Negative state relief theory is the proposition that people help others in order to relieve their own distress.
  • Non-zero-sum game is an interaction in which both participants can win (or lose).
  • Normative social influence is pressure to conform to the positive expectations or action of other people.
  • Norms are standards established by society to tell its members what types of behaviour are typical and expected.
  • Obedience is following orders from an authority figure.
  • Overbenefited is getting more than you deserve.
  • Pluralistic ignorance is looking to others for cues about how to behave, while they are looking to you; collective misinterpretation.
  • Private attitude change is altering one’s internal attitude.
  • Prosocial behaviour is doing something that is good for other people or for society as a whole.
  • Public conformity is going along with crowd outwardly, regardless of what one privately believes.
  • Reciprocity is the obligation to return in kind what another has done for us.
  • Sensitivity about being the target of a threatening upward comparison is an interpersonal concern about the consequences of outperforming others.
  • Survivor guilt is feeling bad for having lived through a terrible experience in which many others died.
  • Underbenefited is getting less than you deserve.
  • Zero-sum game is a situation in which one person’s gain is another’s loss.