Hero Helping Case Study Social Psychology

Heroic Helping – Jason Austin Cole

Helping behaviour is a form of prosocial behaviour, a term which according to Batson (1998, pg. 282) “was created by social scientists as an antonym for antisocial”. It is defined as acts that intentionally benefit someone else (Eisenberg, 1989, pg. 3). However, there are two major perspectives on helping. The first is the Evolutionary perspective which states that we, like animals, have evolved innate tendencies to eat and drink, so too have we evolved innate tendencies to help others (Stevens, Cushman & Hauser, 2005, pg. 499). The second is the Social Psychology perspective which states that helping behaviour can be either Egoistic, meaning that helping is motivated by self-interest (Piliavin, 1973), or

Jason, aged 16 and only a high school student, had been watching the boy playing on the ice covering Spirit Lake in the vicinity of a highway culvert from a dock about 200 feet away, when the 8 year old boy broke through the thin ice. Jason ran across toward him, but he too broke though into the frigid water, just a few feet away. Jason swam to the boy, submerged, pushed off a rock and lifted him onto solid ice. After repeated attempts against ice that broke under his weight, Jason eventually hoisted himself atop solid ice. He and the boy headed back across the ice to safety. Jason was cold, but recovered that evening. (carnegiehero.org, 2014)

According to Darley and Latané (1970, pg. 30), bystanders in emergencies typically want to intervene, but often find themselves frozen, seemingly helpless to help. This was not true in Jason’s case.
Darley and Latané proposed a five-step decision model of helping in the event of an emergency, but each step is vulnerable to disruption, which would then lead to bystander non-intervention:
• Step 1: Notice the event (Jason witnessed the boy falling into the water)
• Step 2: Interpret the event as an emergency (The boy was in need of