A group of people holding hands. Image credit: Marlis Trio Akbar (CC0)
The question of when and why humans are more likely to lend each other a hand has long been studied. In general, we are more likely to help those who appear more needy or deserving of help. This explains why there is often an outpouring of support after natural disasters and why people are more likely to assist children, who are perceived as being more ‘innocent.’
Unfortunately, people’s spontaneous judgments of need and merit can lead to adverse outcomes. For example, racial stereotyping influences our perceptions of who deserves support. Additionally, different people assess deservingness differently, leading to individual differences in whom we help.
Bas, Roberts et al. wanted to understand how people assess whether others need or deserve help and how this influences their decision to offer assistance (or not). To answer these questions, the researchers examined two competing hypotheses: some individuals may be more or less inclined to perceive others as needing and deserving help, regardless of the context. Alternatively, some people may be more sensitive to contextual cues signaling merit or need. These two processes could explain individual differences in how humans perceive need and deservingness, influencing decisions to help.
Bas, Roberts et al. developed a model of social perception that encompassed both of their hypotheses and designed a laboratory task that tested how social perceptions influence helping behavior. This approach measured two potential mechanisms for how social perception might influence choices: individuals could have a general bias that determines how inclined they are to perceive others as deserving or needy, or differences in sensitivity to integrating context-specific cues. Intriguingly, both mechanisms predicted their willingness to help strangers months later in a separate altruism task.
People who were biased towards perceiving others as deserving paid more attention to others' welfare when they had a chance to help and were more altruistic. People who were more sensitive to context cues around deservingness were more likely to discriminate between others, assisting those perceived as deserving help while withholding aid from supposedly non-deserving individuals. This aspect of the perception-action link was related to brain activation in the right temporoparietal junction, an area of the brain crucial to making judgments about others.
Bas, Roberts et al.'s findings point towards biological differences in how people perceive abstract social concepts like merit or deservingness. The way people perceive these concepts is stable and influences altruistic choice behavior. These results suggest that altruism may be increased by changing how people perceive others, leading to reduced favoritism or discrimination in social settings.
