Elaine is suffering. Who would be most likely to help her?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

When analyzing who would be most likely to help Elaine in a scenario where someone is suffering, we need to consider theories of prosocial behavior and the conditions that increase helping.
Option A: 'Someone feeling personal distress, but only if escape were easy.' This focuses on personal distress as a motive and adds a condition about escape ease. In many models, personal distress can lead to helping, but it is not consistently the strongest or most reliable predictor, and the extra condition about escape being easy adds an unnecessary barrier. It does not capture the typical finding that distress alone does not guarantee helping, especially when personal discomfort is high.
Option B: 'Someone feeling personal distress, but only if they had previously had their distress relieved.' This combines personal distress with a prior relief condition, which is not a standard driver of helping behavior. It introduces an unclear causal link (relief of distress preceding helping) and does not align with mainstream accounts that emphasize either empathic concern or the cost-benefit calculations of helping.
Option C: 'Someone feeling empathy, but only if escape was difficult.' This option links empathy to the difficulty of escaping the situation, suggesting that only when escape is hard will empathic people help. However, empathic concern and the likelihood of helping are not typically conditioned on the difficulty of escape in this way; empathy tends to motivate helping across various contexts, not solely when escape is challenging.
Option D: 'Some feeling empathy, regardless of whether escape was easy or difficult.' This aligns with the empathic concern component of prosocial behavior, which posits that people who feel genuine empathy for someone in distress are more likely to help, independent of the practical difficulty of escaping or avoiding the situation. It captures the idea that empathic motivation can drive helping even when escaping would be easy, or vice versa, and is consistent with theories such as the empathy-altruism framework.
In summary, Option D presents the idea that empathic concern can motivate helping across varying circumstances, whereas the other options introduce conditions or dependencies (on ease of escape, prior distress relief, or escape difficulty) that unnecessarily limit or misstate the typical drivers of helping behavior. The nuances here reflect how empathic concern is a robust predictor of helping compared to self-focused distress or contextual constraints.

PSYC20009_2025_SM2 Lecture 12 Quiz

Elaine is suffering. Who would be most likely to help her?

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