470 Altruism and Prosocial Behavior
encourage one to help again in this situation; (c) because of
situational pressure—a situational attribution not likely to in-
crease helping in the future, at least not when situational pres-
sure is absent; and (d) because I am a compliant schnook and
a pushover who cannot say no—a dispositional attribution
likely to be self-punishing and to discourage future helping.
Grusec (1991) traced the development and demonstrated the
prosocial benefits of children attributing their helping to a
broad disposition to be helpful.
An attributional analysis suggests a complicating limit on
the effects of social learning. To the extent that subsequent
helping is mediated by self-attributions of helpfulness, induc-
ing help by providing material or social rewards in the form
of incentives or salient models, norms, and so on may actu-
ally diminish rather than increase subsequent helping, much
as providing extrinsic incentives can diminish activity based
on intrinsic motivation (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).
Consistent with this possibility, research suggests that provid-
ing incentives—whether money, models, or norms—reduces
self-perceived altruism following helping (e.g., Thomas,
Batson, & Coke, 1981).
These results reveal a dilemma. One important source of
motivation to help, the external reward that comes from pay-
ment or praise for helping, actually undermines a second
important source of motivation to help, the self-reward that
comes from seeing oneself as a good, kind, caring person.
Consider the long-term consequences. As self-reward is un-
dermined, additional external pressure may be necessary to
coerce the person to help. This additional external pressure
further erodes the helper’s chances for self-reward. Over
time, the result may be a slide toward a more and more cyni-
cal self-concept, in which personal kindness plays an increas-
ingly minor role and help is offered only for a price.
The person helped is also likely to make attributions about
why the helper acted. The most obvious and most frequently
studied attributions for helping are that the helper acted
(a) out of concern, with no strings attached, or (b) in order to
indebt, control, or demean the recipient. Attributions of the
second kind may be especially problematic when made by re-
cipients of international aid. Research by Greenberg and his
colleagues (e.g., Greenberg & Frisch, 1972) demonstrated, as
expected, that aid is not appreciated to the degree that it is
perceived as an attempt to control. In return, the benefactor
is likely to receive hostility rather than gratitude (Tesser,
Gatewood, & Driver, 1968).
Esteem Enhancement/Maintenance
Models of esteem enhancement/maintenance have been both
popular and numerous in social psychology since about 1980.
As an explanation for prosocial behavior, these models gen-
erally assume that people act prosocially to enhance or re-
cover self-esteem (Brown & Smart, 1991).
One might expect perceptions of the esteem-enhancing
potential of helping to follow the same three-step devel-
opmental sequence outlined by Cialdini et al. (1981). For
the young child, gaining material rewards for doing good en-
hances esteem; for the middle child, social approval enhances
esteem; by adolescence, self-directed and uncoerced—even
anonymous—help may be necessary to feel good about
oneself.
Not only benefactors, but also recipients, may act and
react with an eye to their self-esteem. Fisher et al. (1982) pro-
posed an esteem-loss explanation for recipients’ negative
reactions to receiving aid. Consistent with the comparative
aspects of self-esteem, Nadler, Fisher, and Ben-Itzhak (1983)
found that when individuals were having trouble on a task
that reflected on their abilities, receipt of help from a friend
produced more negative self-evaluation than did receipt of
help from a stranger.
DePaulo, Nadler, and Fisher (1983) pointed out that con-
cern over loss of esteem both in others’ and in one’s own eyes
may go a long way toward explaining reticence to seek help
when in need. To seek help is to admit that you lack the com-
petence, knowledge, or other valuable resources necessary to
cope and, moreover, that the person from whom you seek
help has these resources. Consistent with this analysis, peo-
ple are less likely to seek help to the degree that they hold
themselves in high esteem and do not anticipate a chance to
reciprocate the help (Nadler, 1991).
This analysis must be qualified by roles and norms, how-
ever. For the young child, seeking help from his or her par-
ents is not likely to be upsetting or damaging to self-esteem.
For a middle-level executive who finds himself out of a job,
the thought of applying for welfare assistance to feed his
family may be devastating.Moral ReasoningMoral reasoning theories (also called cognitive developmen-
tal or rational developmental theories of morality) build on
the classic work of Piaget. Typically, they accept his account
of intellectual development as a process of adaptation
through assimilation and accommodation proceeding in an
invariant developmental sequence from sensorimotor to pre-
operational to concrete operational to formal operational
thought (Piaget, 1926). They also accept Piaget’s (1932)
application of this model of intellectual development to moral
judgment. Moral reasoning theories, of which Kohlberg’s
(1976) is the best known, treat situations in which one person