Outline research relating to human altruism and/or bystander behaviour

... elping dropped from 86% when the victim was disfigured to 61% when they were. West et al. (1975) found a black person who had broken down in a car received help from 97% of people who were black. When the victim was white, they received help from white people. Piliavin (1969) found that there was a slight racial bias if the victim was drunk. WE are more likely to help people who we see as being similar to ourselves, accounting for the racial bias that has been found. People who are dressed smartly are more likely to receive help than someone who is untidy (Bickman, 1974). Victims are more likely to be helped if they are seen as deserving causes rather than the cause of their own misfortune, like the drunken people in Piliavin's study.

The causal schemata theory proposed by Kelly (1973), is when we make attributions about a situation using our previous schema, we take the obvious explanation or situation without considering other causes. We use stored information that has come from our schemas to make sense of a situation. We seem to use the 'discounting principle' meaning that we discount all other possible causes in favour of the one most familiar to us. Fiske and Taylor (1991) said that we use a "causal shorthand" to explain behaviour, our own or other peoples, quickly. As Piliavin said we are more likely to help people who are seen as deserving. This causal schemata theory links to this because if we know someone who has been in the same situation or we have then we will remember this and help them because we know how they feel. If we see someone in trouble then we use our past experiences (stored in schema) to decide whether to help them, if we have been in the same or similar situation then we will have the relevant schema.

Piliavin et al. (1981) proposed the Arousal: Cost-Reward model to explain how people in social situations weigh up the costs and benefits of behaving in a particular way. It suggests that people work through three stages when they come across a person in need:

1. Physiological arousal - when seeing someone in need we experience certain physiological responses e.g. increased heart rate, sweating.

2. Labelling the arousal - physiological arousal can lead to someone labelling it as distress or empathy but Piliavin believed that em ...