Does Social Approval Increase Helping?

Abstract

In order to determine the interactive effects of social response and individual differences in need for approval on subsequent helping behavior, 46 female subjects were either socially rewarded or punished for helping the experimenter. As predicted, subjects who were high in need for approval were subsequently more likely to help a confederate who had dropped books if they had been socially rewarded than if they had been punished. Subjects low in need for approval were unaffected by the previous social reinforcement. Several explanations for these results are offered. The importance of examining interactions between personality and situational variables in research on prosocial behavior is discussed.