Introduction

Hello. My name is Dr Juliet Wakefield.

I'm a senior psychology lecturer at Nottingham Trent University,

and today I'm going to deliver the lecture on

the social psychology of helping and help seeking.

As a social psychologist, I'm interested in how our social world around us,

our friends, families, local communities, neighbourhoods, nations and so on.

Impact on our thinking, our feeling and our behaviour.

And one topic that's been really key in this

within social psychology is the act of help giving.

Why might we choose to help others?

And why might we choose not to help others?

And in turn, why might we decide to seek help when we were in need?

Or why might we decide not to seek help?

These are some of the questions we're going to explore in today's lecture

and as well as that.

One of the key points of us working within the field of social psychology is

to develop knowledge that we can use to help people to improve their lives,

to allow them to live happier, healthier lives.

So we'll think at the end of the lecture about how

to potentially apply some of this knowledge to people's everyday lives,

to make people feel more able to help others

more able to seek help when they're in need.

So the lecture today is consisting of six different sections will begin by having

a think about a general introduction to helping and help seeking before moving on.

To look at helping in more detail will start by having

a think about some early social psychological research into helping,

particularly looking at the case of Kitty Genovese's and

how that led to explorations into the bystander Effect

will then move on and look at some more recent work on helping

and helping literature around the social identity perspective.

So the importance of our social group memberships for are helping.

Behaviour will then move on in the second half

of the lecture to think about help seeking behaviour

and again starting by thinking about some traditional 19

sixties 19 seventies research into help seeking within social psychology

and what the key conclusions from that was with a

particular focus on the threat to self esteem model,

which is a main model in that area.

Well, then again, move on and look at some more recent help seeking research,

which again highlights the importance of our

group memberships for help seeking and help receiving

Well, then finish up with some overall conclusions

and some implications from today's lecture.

So we'll start with the first section,

which is an overall introduction to the topics of

helping and help seeking from a social psychological perspective.

One important question to begin with is how we define helping behaviour.

We can think of helping behaviour as a more general term,

which is pro social behaviour,

and this itself can involve many different types of behaviour.

So it can involve us giving money to charities or

to people who need it or our time through volunteering.

We could even give blood to a hospital or show someone the way if they get lost.

There are so many different forms of pro social behaviour or helping behaviour,

and we can think of pro social behaviour in an umbrella term as

an act that we do for other people or for society in general.

That is unlikely, or at least not designed to benefit us as individuals.

So something we do that is relatively selfless, um,

and something that is designed to benefit other people.

So with that definition in mind,

we can start to think how common is pro social behaviour?

How frequently do people engage in this type of helping?

The answer is that it is actually exceptionally common.

So, for instance,

we know that over half of the UK population donates

to charity in an average month and perhaps unsurprisingly,

the most common charity types to donate to our things like hospitals,

medical research, child charities, animal charities, those types of things.

So monetary donations are very common,

but so is time donation.

So we know that over 50 million people in the

UK donate their time to charity as volunteers each month.

So this is something that's very common.

Pro social behaviour happens a lot,

and we're very much likely to underestimate how frequently it occurs

because lots of pro social acts are hidden go UN recorded

people helping their neighbours or people just conducting a random

act of kindness for a stranger in the street.

These are not things that we can observe a record,

so it's likely that people conduct engage in far more

of these helpful behaviours than we would ever realise.

With that, then we need to think if this is such a common behaviour.

Why might people engage in it?

And also, why might people not engage in it?

What might make people less likely to be helpful?

At this point? It's really important to remember that helping is a transaction.

So not only does it involve one person giving help to another,

it also involves that other person either seeking or receiving the help.

Both sides of the transaction have to work if

that help is to be given and received successfully.

So not only do we need to think about the role of the helper here,

we also need to think about the role of the help recipient or the help seeker.

And it's equally important within social psychology that

we explore this person's perspective to highlight this,

Um, I want to tell you a brief story.

It's a true story. From 1978

It involves a company called Perkin Elmer,

an engineering company who won the very prestigious contract to

design and build a mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope.

This was going to put them on the map in terms of a company.

A huge financial incentive was involved,

so the company set up a task force of people within

the organisation who were going to design and build this mirror.

Of course, the company wanted this to be done well,

So they got external mirror experts to come in

and allow the organisation and the expertise that they had so they would come

and they would advise whenever the group within the organisation needed that help.

So you can imagine if you were a member of this team within PerkinElmer.

You probably want to get all the assistance that you could from these experts

in order to make sure that you did the very best job possible on building this mirror.

But actually,

what really happened was that they refused to seek help from the experts.

The actually, when they heard that the guy, this guy Rod,

one of the experts had arrived in the building,

they made sure that they ignored him and just turned up the radio.

They were very cautious about engaging with him at all,

and this ultimately led to the project being a failure.

The mirror didn't work properly,

and there was massive problems and massive costs for PerkinElmer to cover.

So we can start to think about why this group

within the organisation might have refused to seek this help.

The expert was more than willing to give the help,

but the transaction wasn't successful because they weren't willing to receive it.

So we need to think about why people might be

willing or unwilling to seek and receive help just as much

as we need to think about why people might be

willing or unwilling to give help in the first place.

So to conclude this first part of the lecture,

we can think about the fact that pro social behaviour,

this idea of helping others with little benefit

to ourselves is something that's very common.

In fact, we are likely to massively underestimate how frequently it occurs.

We know that within social psychology,

we've often tended to focus quite a lot on

helpers and the importance of helping other people.

But we equally need to think about the help seeker

help receiver and why people might refuse to seek help or refuse

to accept help when they're in need in the next section.

Then we'll start to think about some social psychological theories of helping

and what these theories can tell us about why

people may choose to seek or not to seek help