463CHAPTER 19
Altruism and Prosocial Behavior
C. DANIEL BATSON AND ADAM A. POWELL
WHY DO—AND DON’T—PEOPLE
ACT PROSOCIALLY? 463
VARIANCE-ACCOUNTED-FOR EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS 464
Dispositional Versus Situational Determinants 464
Proliferating Predictors and Predictions 465
APPLICATION AND EXTENSION
OF EXISTING THEORY 465
Social Learning 465
Tension Reduction 466
Norms and Roles 467
Exchange or Equity 469
Attribution 469
Esteem Enhancement/Maintenance 470
Moral Reasoning 470
The word prosocialdoes not appear in most dictionaries; it
was created by social scientists as an antonym for antisocial.
Prosocial behavior covers the broad range of actions
intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself—
behaviors such as helping, comforting, sharing, and cooper-
ating. The word altruismhas at times been used to refer to a
subset of these behaviors—for example, self-sacrificial help-
ing or helping in the absence of obvious, external rewards.
Such usage seems inappropriate, however, because altruism
is a motivational concept. Altruism is the motivation to in-
crease another person’s welfare; it is contrasted to egoism,
the motivation to increase one’s own welfare (MacIntyre,
1967). There is no one-to-one correspondence between
prosocial behavior and altruism. Prosocial behavior need not
be motivated by altruism; altruistic motivation need not pro-
duce prosocial behavior.
WHY DO—AND DON’T—PEOPLE
ACT PROSOCIALLY?
Addressing the question of why people act prosocially may
seem natural and necessary for social psychologists. Indeed,
in the field’s first text William McDougall (1908) made this
question focal: “The fundamental problem of social psychol-
ogy is the moralization of the individual by the society into
which he is born as a creature in which the non-moral and
purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altru-
istic tendencies” (p. 16). When Kurt Lewin, his students, and
his colleagues ushered in modern social psychology in the
1930s and 1940s, however, other questions took precedence.
These were the pressing social-problem questions provoked
by the rise of Nazism, two world wars, the Holocaust, the
advent of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and racial injustice.
Attention was directed to totalitarian and autocratic leadership,
conformity and obedience to authority, aggression, prejudice,
ethnocentrism, interpersonal and intergroup conflict, propa-
ganda, persuasion, and attitude formation and change.
The 1960s brought the question of why people act proso-
cially to the fore once again. This question did not replace the
social-problem questions; it was added to the list. Several
shocking cases in which bystanders failed to help persons in
desperate need raised concern about the breakdown of social
structure and social decency, especially in urban environ-
ments. Best known is the case of Kitty Genovese, whose bru-
tal stabbing and eventual death was witnessed by 38 of her
neighbors in the Kew Gardens area of Queens, New York.
Her murder took more than half an hour, and despite herAmalgamated Models 471
ANOMALOUS FAILURES TO ACT PROSOCIALLY 472
Effect of Others on Decisions Under Pressure 472
Blaming the Victim 473
ANOMALOUS PROSOCIAL ACTS 473
The Altruism Question 474
Beyond the Egoism-Altruism Debate:
Other Prosocial Motives 476
Conflict and Cooperation of Prosocial Motives 478
RESEARCH METHOD MATTERS 478
CONCLUSION 479
REFERENCES 479