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Self-Compassion And Empathy In Evolutionary Psychology

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Human beings are selfish, selfless, empathetic, and apathetic. Humans are capable of committing the most violent crimes, ignoring desperate pleas, but they’re also capable of helping and saving strangers in life-threatening situations. The motivation and reasons for helping others can be argued from multiple perspectives. Evolutionary psychology posits people help due to kin selection and due to the norm of reciprocity, social exchange theory argues that people help to maximize social rewards and minimize social costs, whereas according the empathy-altruism hypothesis, when people feel empathetic towards another, they will help because of altruistic reasons (Arsonson, Wilson, Fehr, & Akert, 2017). Prosocial behaviour is an important topic because …show more content…

Empathy was measured through the emotional response of the participant, and prosocial intentions through intention of aiding another person without inferring whether the participants helped based on selfish reasons or altruistic motivation. Welp and Brown (2014) predicted greater self-compassion would predict greater empathy and a greater willingness to help someone in need. Participants were assessed using the Self-Compassion Scale, and then exposed to one of four variations of a story about a man who had a flat tire and was stranded. The stories differed in describing his race, and whether he was at fault, resulting in four conditions. The results did not fully support the hypothesis, it was found that self-compassion predicted greater willingness to help the stranded man while simultaneously reducing empathy for him despite his racial …show more content…

This experiment would take place over the course of a week, and would be conducted at 8:15 a.m., 12:15 pm, and 4:15 p.m. to allow for more generalizable results. A female confederate would be sitting at a community table at the West Mall Starbucks, and would appear to be studying. The female confederate would either be wearing a SFU hoodie and have a SFU backpack, as well as a SFU notebook and pen, or they would be wearing descriptive clothing, backpack, and accessories. The female confederate would “accidentally” spill water over their notes, while two observers would watch whether anyone helped. Helping behaviour would be measured through the number of people who get napkins for the female confederate or use napkins to help dry out the pages. Helping intentions will also be measured by the observers recording the amount of people who looked at the confederate for three or more seconds following the water spill, but did not help. I predict that people will be more likely to help the confederate when she is wearing SFU clothing and accessories because they will identify with the confederate as a student and feel empathetic towards her because they could imagine themselves in her shoes, and therefore will feel the need to help the confederate. The participants who help the confederate would afterwards be approached by one of the observers who would ask why they helped the confederate and

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What causes people to care for those in need? From people that are close and hold strong family bonds to an unemployed war veteran living on the street, something is exhibited from within someone to help those in need. That something is the key to establishing interpersonal relationships, a positive atmosphere, and a happier society. That something is selflessness. A great example of the impact selflessness has is the book Forgotten Fire, written by Adam Bagdasarian, which described the story of a boy trying to survive in the Armenian Holocaust, where he meets many people along the way that help him.

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People are often think of themselves and base their actions on what would harbor the best outcomes for them. It is rare in which people would go out of their way to help other even when it won’t harm them to do so. Therefore, it goes to show, based on that pattern, that the

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The Bystander Effect stems from altruism, which is selfless goodness. The Lords of Discipline showcases many instances of this effect, and discusses the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese in which the very concept was conceptualized. Not only does the story influence the practice of this effect, but it also discourages it, therefore bemusing its students on how to react in emergency situations. The repercussions of falling fault to this effect can be in some cases lethal, and can compromise one’s social life. Kitty Genovese would still be alive today had her neighbors not been negligent to the cries heard from

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Based on this we can infer that individuals should go out of their way to help others out. Without Doc’s help, the sick people may have died. This influences the idea that individuals should help others because it would make a difference in the world. Like characterization, emotional appeal can be also used to define the role of the

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The article “Adventures in Good and Evil,” written by Sharon Begley explores the rationale behind people’s altruism. She references a study that determined most people would shock an innocent person past the point of extreme pain when told. She then attempts to explore the bias of those who shocked compared to those who refused to shock. She finds: our will to forgive or to seek vengeance roots in our evolutionary history with similar behavior also found in other primates; however, these evolutionary roots fail to explain those who refused to shock. To explain these people, she explores how these people achieved their level of indiscriminate compassion, finding that what you see, your life experiences, and emotional stability shape your level of altruism.

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According to Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation, the human’s actions are based upon a descending hierarchy of five tiers of needs; physiological needs, safety and security needs, love and belongingness needs, self-esteem needs and self-actualization needs respectively. We can notice a connection between the bystander’s action and the lack of fulfilment of their ‘safety and security needs’ according to the model by observing the bystander’s actions that consist of joining the observing crowd and giving their social responsibility to others due to their ‘diffusion of responsibility’ type of thinking; therefore, we are able to notice that the probability of help is related to the number of bystanders inversely according to Darley and Latane’s research. The solution that the research has found for the victim in an emergency would be to make a specific pressure-implying call to a certain bystander that would clear his diffusion. And as a result, more of the bystanders who are high on their safety and security level will

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Both Latané and Darley 's use of the experimental method and Levine 's use of discourse analysis aim to gain insight as to why the bystander phenomenon occurs, and are interested in why humans seemingly go against their better nature and choose not to help others. (The Open University, 2015a) Latané and Darley 's(1970) cited in Byford, (2014, p.229) experiment consisted of a lab-controlled test and used their quantitative results in order to understand the bystander effect and concluded that people are significantly less likely to respond when in the “passive confederate condition” and most likely to respond when in the “alone condition.” Levine 's (1999) cited in Byford (2014, p.236) viewing of qualitative evidence meant that he was able to determine factors he felt led to the explanation of this effect, such as the examination of the Bulger case and others ' feeling as though they should not become involved in family matters. Both of these experiments were conducted in order to more clearly understand Bystander behaviour and the reasons

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The purpose of this study is to observe people 's prosocial behaviors on UMASS Boston Campus and on the streets. The participants will be 4 people of different ages while I am on campus. I would observe how people would react to others when the trip and everything in the hands falls to the ground. I will look at how they would respond by looking and walking away, deciding not to help them, did not notice what was going on or stop to help them pick up their stuff. When I am on the streets I will observe different people from ages of how they would react to the victims of the bystanders.

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Heroic Helping – Jason Austin Cole Helping behaviour is a form of prosocial behaviour, a term which according to Batson (1998, pg. 282) “was created by social scientists as an antonym for antisocial”. It is defined as acts that intentionally benefit someone else (Eisenberg, 1989, pg. 3). However, there are two major perspectives on helping. The first is the Evolutionary perspective which states that we, like animals, have evolved innate tendencies to eat and drink, so too have we evolved innate tendencies to help others (Stevens, Cushman & Hauser, 2005, pg. 499). The second is the Social Psychology perspective which states that helping behaviour can be either Egoistic, meaning that helping is motivated by self-interest (Piliavin, 1973), or

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This essay explained and evaluated the theories of prosocial behavior under three categories: cognitive, sociocultural, and biological theories. The interest in this topic was motivated by the daily significance of prosocial behavior. Helping others is so prevalent in everyday life and the theories provide an explanation of why humans choose to help others. Additionally, many times in history, heroic acts have been performed such as in the case of Everett Sanderson saving the little girl from being killed by the train in 1975. The theories of prosocial behavior provide an explanation for why people choose to perform these heroic acts and put themselves in danger in order to help others.

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The bystander effect states that during an occurrence or a crisis, the more observers there are, the less

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In the article “The Bystander-Effect: A Meta-Analytic Review on Bystander Intervention in Dangerous and Non-Dangerous Emergencies” explains the research done on bystanders and their likelihood to help an individual. The review on bystander research Latane and Darley (1970) proposed a five step psychological process model. They postulated that for intervention to occur, the bystander needs to (1) notice a critical situation, (2) construe the situation as an emergency, (3) develop a feeling of personal responsibility, (4) believe that he or she has the skills necessary to succeed, and (5) reach a conscious decision to help. To understand the more people around the person, that is in need of help the less someone will help as to do with diffusion of responsibility, which refers to the tendency to subjectively divide the personal responsibility

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For centuries, humans have evolved and developed complex familial systems, uses of tools for survival, and a sense of right and wrong. Humans, or Homo sapiens, are animals that have evolved from ancestors closely related to the nonhuman primates that are seen today. Several distinctive characteristics separate humans from other primate relatives and other vertebrates, such as possessing a bipedal gait and erect posture, as well as having the largest brain relative to body mass and a far more advanced cerebral cortex (Kim, Martinez, Choe, Lee, & Tomonaga 2015). However, an increasing number of studies and researchers suggest that prosocial behaviors that are seen in humans can be observed in nonhuman primates that live in complex social groups.

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To start with, individuals have positive attitudes instead of insensitivity about helping to show their care and sympathy to others. When ones are pleased to assist, they tend to take attention to the person in distress and willing to give a helping hand to them. According to Time, Payne, Gainey (2011) and Samaritan survey (2015), most respondents agree that they will help because the moral thing to do. It reflects they recognize assisting is moral and the behavior of turning a blind eye as socially improper. Obviously, most seem to be voluntary to serve the needs.

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Miracles defined Generally speaking, miracle is seen as an extraordinary event, which is perceptible to the senses, effected by God and functional within a religious context as a sign of the supernatural.i Though there may be several other usages, which do not agree exactly with this definition due to the strictness or looseness of their employment, it can be confidently affirmed that the elements constituting the modern understanding of this religious term are more or less present. The word extraordinary seeks to indicate that such a phenomenon must create a sort of disruption of the normal course of event of nature. As we know, the much empirical science can go is to offer us a provisionary explanation of natural occurrences. It presents

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