120 Chapter 4the costs and rewards of helping differ across
context for men and women. For example,
women may perceive the cost of not helping
to be greater in a situation that threatens rela-
tionships, such as a friend in distress, whereas
men may perceive the cost of not helping
to be greater in a situation that challenges
masculinity, such as saving someone from
drowning. As you will see in Chapters 8 and
9, both women and men are likely to turn to
women for help in friendships and romantic
relationships.
An important moderator variable in
the early meta-analysis was the sex of the
person in need of help. The sex of the recipi-
ent influenced whether a male helped but not
whether a female helped. Males were more
likely to help females than males, whereas fe-
males were equally likely to help females and
males. There also was a sex difference in re-
ceipt of help. Women were more likely than
men to receive help in general (d=-.46). In
addition, women were more likely to receive
help from men than women, whereas men
were equally likely to receive help from men
or women. Thus men helping women seems
to be an especially prevalent kind of helping.
Again, these results may be limited to situa-
tions involving strangers.
Several other moderators emerged
in the meta-analysis. Sex differences were
stronger under public conditions, where
others could view the behavior, than un-
der private conditions, where the behavior
was anonymous. Females and males may
behave differently in the presence of others
because they are concerned with adhering to
gender-role norms. In situations of danger,
we expect men to provide help and women
to receive help. The publication year was
inversely correlated with the size of the ef-
fect, indicating the sex difference was getting
smaller over time. Perhaps our expectationsdifference is larger. Thus, the apparent age
effect was really a study design effect.Helping Behavior
Although I have shown you that the evi-
dence women are more empathic than men
is weaker than you might have assumed, you
probably have every confidence that women
are more helpful than men. Is this true? It is
not true according to an older meta-analysis
of helping behavior (Eagly & Crowley, 1986).
The effect was in the direction of males help-
ing more than females (d=+.34). The 172
studies in this review measured actual help-
ing behavior or the self-report of a commit-
ment to engage in a helping behavior; in other
words, self-reports of general helpfulness were
not included. The direction of this sex dif-
ference may seem surprising because help-
ing is central to the female gender role. The
sex difference was limited to a certain kind
of help, however. That is, the situation was a
moderator variable: Males were more likely
than females to help in situations of danger.
These early studies relied on experimental re-
search that examined helping in the context of
strangers. In the real world, most helping be-
havior occurs in the context of relationships.
Since this early meta-analysis, more re-
cent literature concludes that men are more
likely than women to help in situations of
danger or emergencies, but that women are
more likely than men to help within the con-
text of relationships (Dovidio & Penner, 2001)
and in nonthreatening situations such as vol-
unteering (U.S. Department of Labor, 2009a).
Thus, women and men are more likely to
help in situations congruent with their gen-
der roles. Women’s help is communal (caring
for an individual), and men’s help is agen-
tic (caring to gain status, heroic helping, and
helping the group; Eagly, 2009). It may be thatM04_HELG0185_04_SE_C04.indd 120 6/21/11 8:02 AM