To help or not to help an outgroup member: The role of the target's individual attributes in resolving potential helpers' motivational conflict

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

When people are faced with the decision of whether or not to help an outgroup member, they often experience conflicting motivational tendencies due to the concurrent presence of factors prompting help and factors prompting non-help. We argue that one way of how people deal with this conflict is by taking a closer look at the target's individual attributes, especially at those indicating the target's benevolence. Findings of Experiment 1 (N=96), in which we manipulated intercultural dissimilarity between participants and a (fictitious) recipient of help and normative pressure to help as two factors affecting motivational conflict, support this basic assumption. Specifically, response latencies analyses confirmed that participants assigned a culturally highly dissimilar target spent more time on inspecting target-related information when normative pressure, and thus motivational conflict, was high than when it was low. Experiment 2 (N=141) extended these findings by demonstrating that providing potential helpers with explicit information about an outgroup member's benevolence increased helping intentions through reducing their negative interaction expectancies (and thus motivational conflict). As expected, this mediational relationship could only be observed for participants assigned a culturally highly dissimilar target. Experiment 3 (N=46) replicated these mediation findings in a within-subjects design.

Original languageEnglish
JournalEuropean Journal of Social Psychology
Volume44
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)297-312
Number of pages16
ISSN0046-2772
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 06.2014
Externally publishedYes

DOI

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Governance statt Management oder: Management der Governance
  2. Systematic risk behavior in cyclical industries
  3. Simulation of fatigue crack growth in residual‐stress‐afflicted specimen with a phase‐field model
  4. The importance of product lifetime labelling for purchase decisions
  5. Legal Parameters of Space Tourism
  6. How does collaborative governance evolve?
  7. Series foreword
  8. Approaching the other
  9. Introduction
  10. Erratum zu
  11. Use of Chemotaxonomy To Study the Influence of Benzalkonium Chloride on Bacterial Populations in Biodegradation Testing
  12. When status differences are illegitimate, groups' needs diverge
  13. Scotland
  14. The common European framework of reference for languages
  15. Book review of Kang-Kwong Luke/Theodossia-Souala Pavlidou: Telephone Calls. Unity and Diversity in Conversational Structure across Languages and Cultures.
  16. Reframing the possible
  17. Mapping international inspections
  18. Continous preventive diagnosis for cardiovascular diseases based on stochastic modeling
  19. Creating a Business Case for Sustainability
  20. Use of the concept of Bildung in the international science education literature, its potential, and implications for teaching and learning
  21. A Fictional Risk Narrative and Its Potential for Social Resonance: Reception of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior in Reviews and Reading Groups
  22. Survey on English Entity Linking on Wikidata
  23. Green infrastructure connectivity analysis across spatiotemporal scales
  24. Diversity and specialization of host parasitoid interactions in an urban rural interface
  25. Publicum
  26. Exports and productivity growth
  27. Payments for ecosystem services – for efficiency and for equity?
  28. Blended learning