Helping others

Can you see the discrepancy between these two statements? If I am a helping person then I should help no matter what the circumstances are but I do not help. My helping others depend on many factors that are really not me.

When we help someone it makes us feel good about ourselves, it boosts our self-esteem. When I help someone I feel so good that I promise myself to help everyone in the world but most often I can't keep this promise.

Why?

Our helping behavior is determined more by the situation than by our personality. Whether you help someone in crisis largely depends on interpretation of the situation. Many factors contribute to it.

We help when we feel capable of helping and when we own the responsibility for helping.

For example,You notice the situation that demands intervention. The person walking in front of you suddenly grasps his chest and falls down.

You interpret the situation as emergency.

You know how to help someone having heart attack. Thus you feel that you are capable of dealing with the situation. This feeling of control is very important to initiate help. If you feel that you know nothing about the situation you would not help out of fear of hurting the person more.

You feel responsible for the situation, as you are the only person around.

Our past experiences also play an important role. For example, it is possible that we have experienced or read about the situations that are made up just to rob people. If this memory surfaces up we may chose not to help.

Many a times we may chose to ignore a crisis situation because it is ambiguous. It generates a fear of being ridiculed if we misinterpret it.

Factors determining helping behavior. ------------------------------------

**Bystander effect: This occurs when people watch the crisis without helping. One of the most infamous examples of the bystander effect is the Kitty Genovese case (New York City, 1964). This woman was stabbed to death when she returned home from work at 3 a.m. The murderer took about 30 minutes to kill his victim. He repeatedly stabbed her, ran away and then returned to stab her again. Her screams attracted the attention of at least 38 people; who watched the attack from their apartments. But not one person intervened, and no one even called the police.

Bystander effect occurs for various reasons, *Situation appears ambiguous.

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