VARIABLES ASSOCIATED WITH ALTRUISM

In the past few years researchers on altruism have studied so many variables that an integrated perspective is already difficult. It seems possible, however, to attain some integrative clarity by ordering the variables along two dimensions. To begin with, the prototypical altruistic situation involves someone who gives (a benefactor), and someone who receives (a recipient). In some cases, characteristics of the benefactor affect altruism, and in other cases it is characteristics of the recipient. Independent variables, then, can be divided into those which relate to characteristics of the benefactor, and those which relate to characteristics of the recipient. It is, of course, true that all variables have an ultimate effect on the benefactor, but the effect is often achieved by varying characteristics of recipients. The first dimension of classification, then, separates variables which relate to the characteristics of benefactors that cause or correlate with altruism from the altruism-eliciting characteristics of recipients.

Independent variables can also be classified according to their level of generality. Research on altruism has manipulated independent vari-

ables at four more or less distinct levels of generality. The first level involves temporary psychological states, such as those that accompany experiences of success, failure, dependency, interpersonal attraction, and the observation of models. Most of the research on altruism relates to state variables, probably because they are the easiest to manipulate in laboratory experiments. Independent variables of the state type are largely situational. They have an immediate, temporary, and relatively limited effect, and they usually say little about the nature of the people whom they affect.

The second level of generality involves personality traits. Although states and traits may well interrelate, trait variables such as cyclothymia, need for approval, and conservatism refer to more general and lasting attributes of people. In some cases, traits seem to correspond to the characteristic states of people. Studies which examine trait variables are usually less manipulatively experimental than studies which examine state variables. They generally correlate rating-scale or questionnaire-derived measures of personality traits with an index of altruism.

At the third level—that which involves social roles and demographic variables such as social class, age, and sex—the level of generality is even greater. Social roles and demographic variables differ from trait variables because they are more general, permanent, and basically characteristic. Social roles, of course, often relate to personality traits and psychological states. Women and children, for example, are expected to react differently from men and adults.

The final level, which deals with social norms, is the most general of the four. Norms such as the norm of social responsibility and the norm of reciprocity, if not universal (Gouldner, 1960), affect most people in most cultures. In fact, it could be argued that internalized social norms are so general that they supply no information about the variance in incidences of altruism. Their effect may only be of interest as it relates to temporary states, personality traits, and general social roles. Several researchers, however, have attributed variations in altruism to the effect of social norms. The problems presented by the normative approach will be examined more closely when related research is reviewed.

A classificatory framework that involves the interaction between two sets of criteria has been outlined. Table 1 presents the resulting eight categories and an outline of the variables within the categories that have been examined.

ALTRUISM AS A FUNCTION OF TEMPORARY

STATES OF THE BENEFACTOR

The preponderance of research on altruism has manipulated situational variables which induce states in benefactors that mediate altruistic responses. The state may be a simple affective state, or a cognitive state which relates to particular response dispositions.

Research which has manipulated situational variables and their corresponding psychological states can be divided into three categories. The first two relate to affective states, and the third relates to cognitive states induced by the observation of models. Positive states have been created by supplying experiences which involve success and the perception of competence. Negative states have been created by supplying experiences which involve failure, unintentional harm to another, and acts of transgression. Finally, states have been induced by the presentation of altruistic models. Table 2 contains an outline of research which has manipulated positive and negative affective states.

Positive States of the Benefactor

Four studies have tested the effect of experiences of success and competence on altruism. Berkowitz and Conner (1966) tested the hypothesis that success increases the salience of the social responsibility norm, which leads to altruism toward dependent others. They found that success on a simple task resulted in greater effort on behalf of a highly dependent peer than did failure or no experience at all. Success did not result in more helping for others of low dependency.

The Berkowitz and Conner (1966) study used undergraduates. A later study by Staub ( 1968) suggested that there may be developmental differences in reactions to success and failure. Although fifth-grade children tended to leave more candy for a hypothetical other after they succeeded (versus failed or did average) on a bowling game task, fourth-grade children left more after they failed. The author suggested that a “norm of deserving” motivated the fourth graders, but that the fifth graders were motivated by “norms or standards or values directly related to sharing.” No reason was given, though, why the two norms should differentially affect the two particular age groups in question. The additional finding that children who saw themselves as having internal control over their environment shared more after success than those who felt externally controlled suggests that perceived competence is related to sharing.

A relationship between competence and altruism was found by Midlarsky (1968a) . Subjects who were told that they adapted well to electric shock (high competence) took more shocks for another than those who were told they adapted poorly. Unfortunately, the shocks were not of equal intensity across conditions. A later study by Kazdin and Bryan,[footnoteRef:1]though, which controlled for the cost of helping, found essentially the same thing. Subjects who were told they were highly competent on tasks which were both relevant and irrelevant to the dependent variable offered to donate more blood than those who were told they were incompetent. The notion that a temporary state mediated the altruism was supported by the fact that very few volunteers followed through with their commitment to give blood. Once they had a chance to recover from the positive experience, it would appear, their altruistic inclinations decreased. (It is, of course, possible that some subjects generalized their perceived competence to getting rid of the solicitor, with no intention of ever giving blood.) [1: Kazdin, A. E., & Bryan, J. H. Competence and volunteering. Unpublished manuscript, Northwestern University, 1968.]

Some naturalistic reports relating to reactions to disasters (e.g., Form & Nosow, 1958; Torrance & Ziller, 1957) suggest that observers who perceive themselves as competent in emergency situations help more than

TABLE 2

STUDIES WHICH EXAMINED THE EFFECT or AFFECTIVE STATES OE THE BENEFACTOR ON ALTRUISM

Author and date

Subjects Sex Age

N

Main independent variables

Main dependent variables

Positive states of the benefactor

Negative states of the benefactor

Darlington & Macker (1966) Rawlings (1968) Krebs & Baer Lerner & Matthews (1967) Lerner Freedman et al. (1967) Experiment 1 Experiment 2 Experiment 3 Berscheid & Walter (1967) Epstein & Hornstein (1969) Wallace & Sadalla (1966) Silverman (1967)

F F M M

cs cs cs CS cs HS cs cs adult cs cs 11

39 40 40 66 61 16 67 74 240 60 55 199

Failure which harms (vs. does not harm) another. Failure which harms another vs. observation of harm to another Success or failure on intelligence test ; harm or help to another. Fate of recipient dependent vs. independent of draw of benefactor. Fate of recipient dependent on draw of benefactor vs. draw of experimenter. Telling a lie vs. not telling a lie. Responsibility for upsetting index cards. Responsibility for upsetting index cards. Opportunity to compensate harm done adequately. Punishment (vs. no punishment) for selfish choice ; liked, disliked, neutral recipien t. Public, private, or no transgression. Private high cheating, private low cheating, no cheating.

Frequency of volunteering to give blood (after three requests). Duration of reciprocal shocks. Amount of help volunteered for charitable cause. Frequency of choices to comfort partner. Frequency of choices to take partner’s place; frequency of choices to comfort partner Frequency of volunteering for pleasant or unpleasant experiment. Frequency of volunteering for victim’s vs. nonvictim’s experiment. Frequency of volunteering to help victim in person vs, not in person. Frequency of compensating victim and nonvictim. Frequency of selfish choices (choices which earned 104 but shocked another) . Frequency of volunteering for stress experiment. Amount of free-play time volunteered for experiment.

Note.—Abbreviations are : HS = high school student; CS — college student. 8 Age of first-grade children estimated at 6, etc. b Sex constituted a variable.

those who do not. Competence in disasters, though, is different from most experimentally manipulated competence. In experiments, the experience of success seems to increase selfesteem, which leads to increased positive affect and altruism. In disaster situations, however, it would seem that it is the implicit role requirements associated with competence, especially when the competence is the result of special training, that mediate helping behavior.

In summary, although none of the relevant experiments supplied unequivocal evidence, they all found indications that altruistic responses on behalf of dependent others are more probable after success than after failure, or after a neutral experience.

Negative States of the Benefactor

Of the studies that compared the effects of success and failure on altruism, only one (Staub, 1968) found a positive relationship between failure and altruism, for fourth-grade children, and that relationship reversed itself in the fifth grade. Other studies, though, have found that failure which has a particular consequence—harm to another—leads to altruistic responses. Darlington and Macker (1966), for example, found that failure to complete a pencil-and-paper task correctly resulted in more agreement to give blood when the failure hurt a helpful other than when it did not. The findings were interpreted as evidence for displacement of guilt-produced altruism. Because it was only after the third of three appeals for blood that any difference was found, and because 13 subjects were discarded, the results of the study must be viewed with caution. Moreover, a later study (Rawlings, 1968) found that the observation of a person receiving harm is enough in itself to induce altruism. Although subjects whose errors on a task caused their partners to receive shocks delivered reciprocal shocks of short duration to a third person (and, therefore longer duration to themselves), reciprocal shocks of short duration were also given when they only observed their partners getting shocked.

A study by Krebs and Baer [footnoteRef:2] compared [2: Krebs, D. L., & Baer, R. The effect of perceived competence and unintentional help and harm to]

the effect that experiences of success, failure, and helping and harming another had on charitable behavior. Altruism was greatest after failure which harmed another, and least after success which benefited another. There was no difference between the straight success and failure conditions. The findings were interpreted as support for a self-concept equilibrium model which suggests that people whose self-images are unrepresentatively low are likely to seize an opportunity to behaviorally reassert a more favorable selfdefinition. Unrepresentatively high self-images, on the other hand, are not maximized.

In the Krebs and Baer (see Footnote 3) study, the success and failure of the potential benefactor had a corresponding effect on his partner, and the altruism was directed to a charitable cause. Studies by Lerner and his associates demonstrated that partner-oriented altruism occurs in situations where success for self results in failure for another. Subjects who drew a slip of paper that assigned them to a control condition and their partner to a shock condition (fates interdependent) were more prone to comfort the other and volunteer to take his place than subjects who determined only their own fate (fates independent; Lerner and Matthews, 1967) or subjects whose fates were determined by the experimenter (Lerner 4 ).

Other studies that did not involve success and failure have supplied further support for the notion of reparative altruism. Two studies investigated the effect of compliant and unintentional harm-doing on altruism. Carlsmith and Gross (1969) found that subjects in a Milgram (1963) type of situation who delivered shocks to another were more likely to volunteer to support a humanitarian project than those who did not shock another. Freedman, Wallington, and Bless (1967, Experiment 2) found that subjects who knocked over a pile of index cards were more willing to volunteer for an experiment to help another than those who did not, providing that the solicitor was not the owner

another on altruism. Paper submitted for publication.

4 Lerner, M. S. The effect of a negative outcome on cognitions of responsibility and attraction. Unpublished manuscript, University of Kentucky, 1968,.

of the index cards. In a similar situation (Experiment 3), subjects who harmed another were more likely to volunteer to help him if they did not expect to meet him than if they did. Although harm-doing elicited altruism, it was not oriented directly toward its victim.

The Darlington and Macker (1966), Krebs and Baer (see Footnote 3), Carlsmith and Gross (1969), and Freedman et al. (1967) studies suggest that reparative altruistic behavior relieves an unpleasant negative state associated with lowered self-esteem by supplying a situation in which a wrong can be righted and self-esteem elevated. The Rawlings (1968) and Lerner and Matthews (1967) studies, though, lend themselves to a slightly different interpretation. It may be that harming another creates a feeling of guilt, which results in expiative self-punitive responses. In cases where altruism was directed toward the expiation of guilt it would be expected that (a) private transgressions would lead to expiative responses, and (b) self-punitive expiation would be preferred to nonpunitive reparation. These predictions do not follow from a reparative self-esteem model because the function of altruism is to reassert a new self-definition, with no necessity for pain.

Although it is possible that transgression elicits reparative responses in some situations by some people, and expiative responses in other situations by other people, it seems that the altruistic responses in most of the relevant studies were of the reparative nature. Freedman et al. (1967, Experiment 1), for example, failed to find, as expected, that subjects who lied about their knowledge of an experiment chose the more unpleasant of two other experiments. And Berscheid and Walster (1967) found that harm-doers were most likely to compensate their victims when they could make exact reparation. Female members of church auxiliaries who caused their partners to lose needed books of green stamps subsequently awarded bonuses to them if the bonuses were neither insufficient nor excessive relative to the original loss. The behavior of the church ladies, in the experiment at least, hardly seemed self-punitively expiative.

There is one study, though, that lends itself to an expiation interpretation. If guilt is relieved by punishment, then it can be predicted that punished responses are less likely to extinguish than responses that are not punished. This prediction was partially supported by Epstein and Hornstein (1969). They found that selfish behavior toward a disliked other (pressing a lever which maximized chances of gaining ten cents, while delivering an electric shock to another) increased, and altruistic behavior decreased, when selfish behavior was punished by a third person. Due to the fact that selfish behavior toward a liked other decreased after punishment, the generality of the findings is limited.

Two final studies suggest that private transgressions are not as likely to lead to altruistic reparation as public transgressions. Wallace and Sadalla (1966) found that subjects who broke an expensive machine were more likely to volunteer for a painful experiment than those who did not, but only if their transgression was discovered. Silverman (1967) failed to find a higher incidence of volunteering from children who cheated on a task but did not consider themselves caught than from those who did not cheat.

In summary, many studies have supported the notion that public transgression, whether intentional or unintentional, whether immoral or only situationally unfortunate, leads to reparative altruism. Reparative altruism would seem to alleviate a negative state associated with lowered self-esteem. When amends cannot be made to the victim, reparative responses are generalized to others; in fact, in some situations reparative responses are made only if they can be directed toward a third party.

States Induced by the Observation of Altruistic Models

The observation of models, according to Bandura and Walters (1963), affects behavior in two distinct ways: by inducing the acquisition of long-term behavioral dispositions, and by inducing the performance of imitative behavior. The acquisition of response dispositions, which, in relation to moral behavior, is referred to as internalization, forms the basis of behavioral analogues in which models correspond to parents, and modeling effects are thought to lead to long-range changes in personality. Performance, on the other hand, refers to situation-specific behavior that occurs as the result of the induction of temporary states. Although most of the research on modeling relates to the performance of altruistic behavior, much of it is interpreted as evidence for the internalization of altruistic dispositions. It is, of course, difficult to sort out acquisition and performance effects in one-shot laboratory experiments, but to draw conclusions about the development of personality traits on the basis of situational conformity is clearly unwarranted. Before conclusions can be drawn about the acquisition of behavioral dispositions, two criteria should be met: (a) The behavior in question should be general to situations other than that in which it was elicited, and (b) it should be relatively enduring. Because the preponderance of studies on modeling have failed to meet the two criteria of internalization, they seem best interpreted in relation to parameters of performance, as a function of temporary states. This is not to say that they should be considered irrelevant to socialization, but only to suggest that they have not established that modeling produces longterm personality changes; or even that it would, on a prolonged basis.

Although the modeling approach has encouraged research efforts, it has generally failed to supply explanations for modeling effects. The label modeling has been used to explain modeling effects, but modeling, like imitation, merely describes a sequence of congruent actions—it does not explain it. Before any real explanatory power is achieved, the reasons why models induce imitative behavior must be elucidated; and these reasons may well vary across situations.

A survey of the studies on modeling suggests that the performance of altruistic behavior may be based on one of several conceptually distinct aspects of modeling. An attempt will be made to sort out the aspects of modeling situations that elicit modeling effects by organizing the relevant studies in terms of what seems to be their most appropriate explanatory base.

At the most elementary level, models make behavioral alternatives salient: They draw attention to particular courses of action, and increase the salience of social norms. Second, they supply information about what is appropriate in various situations by setting an example, by helping to create a normative standard, and by helping to supply a definition of the situation. Third, models supply information about the consequences of courses of action. Although the three aspects of the modeling situation are conceptually distinct, they are not, in most cases, unrelated. A rough hierarchical relationship, in fact, seems to exist between them, with the third subsuming the second, and the second subsuming the first. Although models who make behavioral alternatives salient need not supply information about what is appropriate, nor need they supply information about behavioral consequences, models who supply information about behavioral consequences usually supply information about what is appropriate, and they usually make a course of action salient. Studies which do not unequivocally supply information about appropriateness seem most properly reviewed in the first category, and studies in which the perception of consequences is in doubt are reviewed in the second. Table 3 contains an outline of studies on modeling which fall in the three categories.