ALTRUISMaltruism in children. Sorokin (1950, 1970[1950])
wrote extensively on love and altruism, and car-
ried out the first empirical work on informal help-
ing and volunteering by studying individuals nomi-
nated by others as ‘‘good neighbors.’’ It is only
since the mid-1960s, however, that altruism has
been extensively examined through systematic
research.
Most social psychology textbooks attribute this
upsurge of interest in altruism and helping behav-
ior to the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 and
the failure of the thirty-nine witnesses to inter-
vene. The subject of widespread media coverage,
this incident motivated Latané and Darley’s ex-
perimental investigations of bystander inaction,
published in The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t
He Help? (1970). During the 1970s, helping behav-
ior became one of the most popular topics in social
psychological research, although this emphasis de-
clined considerably through the 1980s and 1990s
(see Batson 1998 for figures on the number of
published studies by decade). Because of this be-
ginning, the vast majority of the studies deal with
intervention in the momentary problems of strang-
ers. Only since the 1990s has there been much
attention to informal and formal volunteering,
charitable donation, and blood donation. Virtual-
ly all textbooks now have a chapter on altruism and
helping behavior, and a number of books on the
topic have been published in the past three decades.
THEORIES OF ALTRUISM AND HELPING
BEHAVIORHelping behavior has been explained within a
variety of theoretical frameworks, among them
evolutionary psychology, social learning, and cog-
nitive development. One sociobiological approach
maintains that helping behavior and altruism have
developed through the selective accumulation of
behavioral tendencies transmitted genetically.
Three mechanisms have been suggested: kin selec-
tion, reciprocal altruism, and group selection (see
Sober and Wilson 1998). These mechanisms ex-
plain the evolution of altruistic behavior as a func-
tion of, in turn: the greater likelihood that altruists
would save kin, through perpetuating an altruistic
gene shared among them; a tendency to help
others who have engaged in helpful acts, presum-
ably based on a reciprocity gene; and the greater
likelihood of survival of entire groups that in-
clude a higher proportion of altruists. A second
sociobiological theory maintains that helping be-
havior has developed through sociocultural evolu-
tion, the selective accumulation of behavior re-
tained through purely social modes of transmission.
(See Krebs and Miller [1985] for an excellent
review of this literature.) The cognitive-develop-
mental approach to the development of helping
behavior in children emphasizes the transforma-
tion of cognitive structures and experiential role-
taking opportunities as determinants. Social learn-
ing theory explains altruism and helping behavior
as learned through interaction with the social
environment, mainly through imitation and mod-
eling, but also through reinforcement. Reflecting
the same behaviorist principles, exchange theory
suggests that individuals perform helping acts while
guided by the principles of maximizing rewards
and minimizing costs. Helping behavior is instru-
mental in acquiring rewards that may be material,
social, or even self-administered. A more explicitly
sociological framework suggests that individuals
help out of conformity to social norms that pre-
scribe helping. Three norms have received special
attention: the norm of giving, which prescribes
giving for its own sake; the norm of social responsi-
bility, which prescribes helping others who are
dependent; and the norm of reciprocity, which
prescribes that individuals should help those who
have helped them.Reflecting the contemporary social psycho-
logical emphasis on cognition, several decision-
making models of helping behavior have guided
much of the research into adult helping behavior
(Latané and Darley 1970; Piliavin et al. 1981;
Schwartz and Howard 1981). These models speci-
fy sequential decisions that begin with noticing a
potential helping situation and end with a decision
to help (or not). Research has focused on identify-
ing those personality and situational variables that
influence this decision-making process and speci-
fying how they do so. There also has begun to be
more attention to the social and sociological as-
pects of helping—to the context in which helping
occurs, to the relationship between helper and
helped, and to structural factors that may affect
these interactions (Gergen and Gergen 1983;
Callero 1986). A very active focus of work, mainly
identified with Batson (see, e.g., Batson 1991) and
Cialdini and colleagues, has been the attempt to