PSY220H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Prosocial Behavior, In-Group Favoritism, Group Selection
Document Summary
People generally want to help each other. Altruism: prosocial behavior without reward to self (sometimes with harm to self) Distal (e. g. kin selection) and proximal causes (empathy) Kin selection: people give to/help those they are related to. E. g. if you have a group that is uncooperative, they will not survive. Cognitive understanding of another person"s mental state and situation. Theory of mind: understanding that everyone else has thoughts/experiences different than ours/knowledge that other minds exist. Younger children and autistic individuals struggle with tom. Motor cortex: firing inhibited when exposed to pain. Death of 1 is a tragedy, death of millions is a statistic. Empathy can be misleading, focuses on specific cases and neglects aggregate suffering. Assigning a face/individual to a tragedy makes people more empathetic. Identifiable victim effect: tendency to help victims who are identifiable. Inability to conceptualize large numbers (e. g. 2 billion people) Even with identifiable victim & statistics, low donation.
