Why is this important?
Psychologists became interested in understanding helping behavior in the latter part of the 20th century, after the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. Are we really that cold and cruel, as to walk past people in need? Or are there greater forces at work?
Once psychologists began to study when we help, we realized that there are social forces that play a role... but then we began to ask why people help. This has led to greater philosophical questions ("Can helping ever be truly altruistic? Or is helping always selfish on some level?"), questions of the evolutionary origins of helping ("Does helping lead to greater survival and reproductive fitness of our species?"), questions about why some people tend to be more helpful than others ("Do some people have an empathic personality? How can we cultivate it?"), questions about how prosocial behavior develops in childhood, and across the lifespan, and questions about whether relationships matter ("Are people more likely to help a friend than a stranger?").
Over the past 50 years, psychologists from different approaches (social, personality, developmental, etc...) have studied and come to understand the psychology of helping. Unfortunately, many of these perspectives talk past each other. Helping is an important and complex issue, which is bigger than any one "type" of psychology. Our next goal, as psychologists (or on a greater scale, biologists, sociologists, historians, etc...) is to come together to create a greater understanding, to answer the tough questions of why we help, and how to create a better world.
We will start here. In this class, we will work to answer this question: Why do people help? We will examine different perspectives, and then we will integrate them together, to gain greater understanding. This is not easy. However, once we begin to see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, they all begin to fall into place. It will be our goal, by the end of the semester, to begin to fit these different approaches of understanding together, so we can better answer our question, which will hopefully lead to a better tomorrow.
Once psychologists began to study when we help, we realized that there are social forces that play a role... but then we began to ask why people help. This has led to greater philosophical questions ("Can helping ever be truly altruistic? Or is helping always selfish on some level?"), questions of the evolutionary origins of helping ("Does helping lead to greater survival and reproductive fitness of our species?"), questions about why some people tend to be more helpful than others ("Do some people have an empathic personality? How can we cultivate it?"), questions about how prosocial behavior develops in childhood, and across the lifespan, and questions about whether relationships matter ("Are people more likely to help a friend than a stranger?").
Over the past 50 years, psychologists from different approaches (social, personality, developmental, etc...) have studied and come to understand the psychology of helping. Unfortunately, many of these perspectives talk past each other. Helping is an important and complex issue, which is bigger than any one "type" of psychology. Our next goal, as psychologists (or on a greater scale, biologists, sociologists, historians, etc...) is to come together to create a greater understanding, to answer the tough questions of why we help, and how to create a better world.
We will start here. In this class, we will work to answer this question: Why do people help? We will examine different perspectives, and then we will integrate them together, to gain greater understanding. This is not easy. However, once we begin to see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, they all begin to fall into place. It will be our goal, by the end of the semester, to begin to fit these different approaches of understanding together, so we can better answer our question, which will hopefully lead to a better tomorrow.