Do stories of people experiencing hardships arising from the COVID-19 pandemic motivate others to lend a helping hand?<\/p>\n
It turns out people aren\u2019t as keen to get involved in a COVID scenario as they would be in a \u2018normal\u2019 environment, says a study led by Brock University researchers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen there is an explicit mention of the pandemic or pandemic-related need, people were not as willing to help,\u201d says PhD Psychology student Dawn Ryan of the study she conducted with her advisor Karen Campbell, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging.<\/p>\n
Ryan and Campbell have teamed up with Brendan Gaesser, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University at Albany and Daniel Schacter, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University teamed up to test out, in a pandemic situation, the well-documented concept in psychology that the likelihood of helping someone increases if you put yourself in their shoes.<\/p>\n
The researchers conducted two studies involving online questionnaires. In the first study, the researchers presented participants with two sets of stories of people trying to cope with various challenges: one set of stories described everyday needs while the other set tied the needs specifically to the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
Examples of COVID-related needs include necessities such as toilet paper in short supply because of panic buying and access to childcare for health care and other essential workers.<\/p>\n
For both sets of stories, participants were asked to judge the journalistic style of the reporting and were then asked to actively imagine helping out the people portrayed in the stories. At the end, participants rated their willingness to help the individual.<\/p>\n
In the case of everyday needs, participants reported an increased willingness to help after they imagined the situations of those depicted in the stories.<\/p>\n
But this didn\u2019t occur in the COVID-related scenarios.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t see an increase in pro-social behaviour, which suggests that maybe there isn\u2019t an increase in empathy,\u201d says Ryan.<\/p>\n
The second study essentially replicated the first one but added questions designed to measure specifically how participants would help. While the team is in the process of interpreting the results, they\u00a0say there may be several reasons why participants reported being less willing to assist in COVID-related situations.<\/p>\n
The desire to help arises out of empathy, which often comes when someone puts themselves in someone else\u2019s shoes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you go through the act of imagining helping this person, the increase in empathy, or understanding more about how that individual feels, may make you more willing to act because you can essentially get a little taste of how they feel,\u201d says Ryan.<\/p>\n
This process of imagining, or \u2018episodic simulation,\u2019 involves being able to chart out future plans. But imagining the future involves drawing upon past experiences, says Ryan.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s entirely possible that people have a difficult time imagining something because this [pandemic] is a new and novel scenario,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople may think, \u2018This is something I can\u2019t picture because I have no experience with a pandemic.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Also, a pandemic is fraught with many unknowns and fears, which were reflected in the research results.<\/p>\n
\u201cParticipants also rated helping in COVID-related scenarios as more dangerous than helping in non-COVID scenarios,\u201d says Ryan. \u201cTaken together, this suggests that explicit mention of the pandemic is likely influencing people\u2019s willingness to help those in need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ryan says she and her team may conduct a third study to see if willingness to help changes as the nature of the pandemic changes.<\/p>\n
She hopes the research will form the basis of recommendations on how to move forward in times of extreme events such as pandemics.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it\u2019s increasing healthy behaviour on an individual level, donating or volunteering your time, or compliance with social distancing rules in general, our aim is to not only identify the cognitive mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but also to find a way to encourage people to engage in these prosocial behaviours so that we can get through this together,\u201d says Ryan.<\/p>\n
The team expects to release the final results of their research, which is being funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences\u2019 Council for Research in the Social Sciences (CRISS) and the Vice-President, Research\u2019s Research Training Award, sometime in the fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do stories of people experiencing hardships arising from the COVID-19 pandemic motivate others to lend a helping hand? It turns out people aren\u2019t as keen to get involved in a COVID scenario as they would be in a \u2018normal\u2019 environment, says a study led by Brock University researchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":67501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3319,1,4,5,38],"tags":[9325,8791,9324,546,9326,9327,522,4703,3325],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67460"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67476,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67460\/revisions\/67476"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}