Similarity to the victim
- Dispositional factors are any individual characteristics which could influence someone’s behaviour. For example:
- Personality
- Specific skills
- Attributes
- Qualities that differentiate one person from another
- A dispositional explanation of prosocial behaviour suggests that some people are naturally more likely to offer help to those in need than others i.e. they possess the characteristics that predispose them to behave in a prosocial way
- People may be more inclined to help others who are similar to them. For example:
- Same race
- Same gender
- Same age
- This makes sense to some extent
- It is almost as if you are helping another version of yourself
- Similarity to a victim is probably the result of the helper identifying with the victim and possibly helping in the hope that at some future point, they might be given help by someone similar to them
- Levine et al. (2005) found that Manchester United fans helped a confederate wearing a Manchester United shirt whereas when the victim wore a Liverpool shirt he was hardly helped at all (i.e. allegiance to football team was the unifying ‘similarity’ factor in this instance)
- Lichtenbarger (1983) used students from two colleges in the same city as her sample:
- Participants found a letter that needed to be posted from either their college or the other college
- Participants showed no same-college preference i.e. they posted the letter irrespective of which college it came from
- Lichtenbarger concluded that the similarity of being a college student could have had a strong enough effect for the students to overlook the differences between their college and the other college
Prosocial behaviour diagram
‘Help yourself mate’: does similarity breed prosocial behaviour?
Exam Tip
Be careful not to confuse situational factors with dispositional factors in the exam. If you are asked about dispositional factors and your answer covers only situational factors it is likely that you would get low/no marks for your answer.