Practice question · Select all that apply
Select every statement that is TRUE about prosocial behaviour and altruism.
Hints
- Two options are false: one strips the 'kin' out of kin selection, and one inverts whose benefit the empathy account is about.
- Kin selection is an argument about shared genes, so relatedness has to make a difference.
Show the answer
- A. Social-exchange theory treats helping as a cost-benefit calculation.
- D. Helping to relieve one's own distress is prosocial but not strictly altruistic.
- E. All altruistic acts are prosocial, but not all prosocial acts are altruistic.
Why
The subset relation, the classification of distress-relief helping, and the cost-benefit framing are all correct. Kin selection specifically predicts MORE helping toward relatives, since that is how shared genes benefit; and the empathy-altruism hypothesis says empathy makes us help for the OTHER person's sake, which is exactly what makes it a case for real altruism.
Practise Prosocial Behavior: Altruism and the Roots of Helping
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Prosocial Behavior: Altruism and the Roots of Helping
- Batson tested whether helping is genuinely altruistic by making escape from the situation easy.
- Kin selection explains helping relatives, and reciprocal altruism explains helping those who may repay it.…
- Not all prosocial behaviour is altruistic, even though every helpful act benefits someone. What separates the…
- Rank these four acts of helping from the one LEAST likely to count as altruism in the strict sense to the one…
- A donor says helping makes them feel good. Does that show the act was really self-interested?