经济不平等对慷慨的影响:一个社会规范视角

Voluntary behavior with the intent to help other people is called prosocial behavior. Why do people help other people? Is personal benefit such as feeling good about oneself the only reason people help one another?

Social proof is a form of persuasion based on comparison and conformity. People compare their behavior and actions to what others are doing and will change to conform to do what their peers do.

Most altruistic behavior—in which one animal helps another at a cost to themselves—occurs between relatives. Scientists think these altruistic behaviors evolved because they increase the inclusive fitness of the animal providing help.

According to some social psychologists, people tend to overemphasize internal factors as explanations—or attributions—for the behavior of other people. They tend to assume that the behavior of another person is a trait of that person, and to underestimate the power of the situation on the behavior of others. They tend to fail to recognize when the behavior of another is due to situational variables, and thus to the person’s state. This erroneous assumption is...

Altruistic behaviors are “unselfish” behaviors—those that help another individual at the expense of the individual carrying out the behavior. Despite the negative consequences for the altruistic animal, these behaviors are thought to have evolved for several reasons.

Another way in which a group presence can affect performance is social loafing—the exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group. Social loafing occurs when our individual performance cannot be evaluated separately from the group. Thus, group performance declines on easy tasks (Karau & Williams, 1993). Essentially individual group members loaf and let other group members pick up the slack. Because each individual’s efforts cannot be evaluated,...