Dispositional Factors in Prosocial Behaviour (AQA GCSE Psychology)

Similarity to the victim

• Dispositional factors are any individual characteristics which could influence someone’s behaviour. For example:

  • Personality

  • Specific skills

  • Attributes

  • Qualities that differentiate one person from another

• A dispositional explanation of prosocial behaviour suggests that some people are naturally more likely to offer help to those in need than others i.e. they possess the characteristics that predispose them to behave in a prosocial way

• People may be more inclined to help others who are similar to them. For example: 

  • Same race

  • Same gender

  • Same age

• This makes sense to some extent

  • It is almost as if you are helping another version of yourself

• Similarity to a victim is probably the result of the helper identifying with the victim and possibly helping in the hope that at some future point, they might be given help by someone similar to them

• Levine et al. (2005) found that Manchester United fans helped a confederate wearing a Manchester United shirt whereas when the victim wore a Liverpool shirt he was hardly helped at all (i.e. allegiance to football team was the unifying ‘similarity’ factor in this instance)

• Lichtenbarger (1983) used students from two colleges in the same city as her sample:

  • Participants found a letter that needed to be posted from either their college or the other college

  • Participants showed no same-college preference i.e. they posted the letter irrespective of which college it came from

  • Lichtenbarger concluded that the similarity of being a college student could have had a strong enough effect for the students to overlook the differences between their college and the other college

Prosocial behaviour diagram

‘Help yourself mate’: does similarity breed prosocial behaviour?

Expertise

• Expertise refers to the special skills, training or knowledge that an individual may possess

  • For example an individual with medical training would feel confident in coming to the aid of someone who had been involved in an accident or was choking

• One of the costs of helping (covered in situational factors in prosocial behaviour) could be that help is not given if someone does not feel that they have the expertise to do so and that by intervening they would do more harm than good

• Cramer et al. (1988) found that nurses, rather than law students, were more likely to help someone who had fallen off a ladder i.e. their expertise meant that they were in a better position to help someone who had suffered an accident

• Kirschenbaum & Rapaport (2020) studied a group of people who had experienced five years of terrorist attacks on their city and found that self-efficacy and having sufficient skills to intervene in emergencies were good predictors of prosocial behaviour

Evaluation of dispositional factors in prosocial behaviour

Strengths

• Many studies of prosocial behaviour use naive participants who are not aware that they are taking part in a study which increases the validity of the findings

• Understanding how similarity influences prosocial behaviour is useful when applied to real-world situations/events: 

  • In educational settings to encourage friendship, ‘buddy’ programmes etc.

  • To promote anti-racist strategies ‘we are a school/town/national community’ 

Weaknesses 

• The theory of bystander apathy does not account for instances of helping behaviour which happen when the helper is completely different to the victim

• It is difficult to operationalise prosocial behaviour variables e.g. how can researchers be 100% sure that someone is helping a victim because of their expertise or similarity to the victim?