ALTRUISTIC MOTIVATIONS FOR REFUSING HELP1
Helping you by not helping me: Altruistic motivations for refusing help
Daniel J. Porter & Stephanie D. Preston
University of Michigan
Author Note
Daniel J. Porter and Stephanie D. Preston, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.
This research was supported in part by a grant from the John T. Templeton foundation and the University of Michigan to SDP. The authors thank Brian Vicker, Alicia Hofelich, and Shinobu Kitayama and the members of the Ecological Neuroscience and Culture and Cognition Laboratories for feedback on previous versions of this manuscript.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel J. Porter, Department of Psychology, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
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Abstract
Many studies have examined the factors that lead to helping others, yet comparatively few have investigated what causes people to reject offers of help. Most extant research in this domain has focused on selfish motivations, ignoring the potential for rejecting help for prosocial reasons, hereafter referred to as “altruistic rejection.” On the basis of spontaneous descriptions of rejection behavior and reactions to hypothetical scenarios in two studies (n = 173 & 578), we concluded that altruistic rejection exists. Individuals varied in the extent to which this motivation drives their rejection of help. People were more likely to reject aid in hypothetical situations when it was costly to the helper and they felt close to them—conditions that strengthen the interpretation of these rejections as having a prosocial quality. Perspective taking instructions allowed people to reject costly aid even when they did not feel close to the helper, again, mimicking prosocial motivations. Altruistic rejection appears to be proximately motivated by feeling distressed in the situation, which is still consistent with the empathy-altruism hypothesis. It appears that altruism influences not only when we decide to help, but also from whom we accept help, in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Keywords: altruism, help refusal, perspective taking, empathy, prosocial behavior, personal distress
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Helping you by you not helping me: Altruistic motivations for refusing help
Evolutionarily, it makes little sense for an organism to refuse free resources, yet humans decline offers of aid every day. Although most cases are relatively inconsequential, like not taking a friend’s umbrella on a rainy day, sometimes people refuse help in situations with more dire ramifications. For instance, Ohio governor John Kasich rejected federal disaster relief after a series of destructive tornados (Horn & Faherty, 2012) and earlier a collection of African Catholic bishops refused humanitarian aid from Episcopalian sources despite widespread starvation among their parishioners (Duin, 2005). Perhaps hitting closer to home, many people know aging adults who struggle to live independently yet refuse basic help from their children or grandchildren, sometimes even failing to call for help during medical emergencies, even when they have access to phones or medical alert devices.
Though rejecting help that is needed may seem maladaptive, research has demonstrated that there really is no “free lunch,” and most help comes with a hidden price tag in the form of costs to social status, emotional well-being, or direct reciprocity obligations.In some cases, avoiding the costs of receiving help may be more important than receiving the benefits. Altruism—defined here in the biological sense of any behavior initiated by one organism that temporarily decreases its own fitness and increases or protects the fitness of another (Stephens, 1996)—appears to be costly both for helpers and recipients. Beyond the energy and resources invested by the helper, accepting aid also has a variety of explicit and implicit costs for recipients. The recipient needs to integrate these costs in order to make a sound decision to accept help, and the following formula explains a rational choice (Ackerman & Kendrick, 2008):
If wiBi – wjCj > 0, then decision = accept
Where B are benefits to the recipient, C represents costs to the recipient, and w is the magnitude of importance that an individual places on the consequence in a specific situation (Ackerman & Kendrick, 2008). Based on this type of cost-benefit analysis, it can actually be adaptive to refuse help when the costs of accepting are high. Many potential costs for accepting aid have been previously discussed in the literature including opportunity costs, energetic costs, potential injury from aggressive or deceptive conspecifics, harm to mate relationships (Ackerman & Kendrick, 2008), reduced social status (Nadler & Halabi, 2006), reduced independence (Moen, 1978), self-esteem depletion (Fisher, Nadler, & Whitcher-Algana, 1982), and obligations to reciprocate (Greenberg & Shapiro, 1971; Perugini & Galluci, 2001; Shen, Wan, & Wyer, 2011). In some cases, these problems will outweigh the benefits offered, and the rational decision is to reject the offered aid.
However, in still other cases individuals still reject help where the net benefits offered appear to outweigh the costs to that individual of accepting, and the rational decision rule appears to be violated. In non-pathological cases, individuals must perceive additional costs that are not explained by the potential costs to the recipient listed above. The only other cost that occurs in these situations happens to the helper, as he or she will usually expend resources when giving aid. We suggest that when net beneficial help is rejected, it may be because during the cost-benefit analysis, the recipient is calculating the expense the helper incurs by giving aid as a cost to his or herself. We refer to such cases where individuals refuse help, even when it would appear to be net-beneficial, as altruistic rejection—rejection that is motivated implicitly or explicitly by other-oriented desires to avoid imposing a cost on the helper, rather than self-oriented concerns about costs to the self from accepting the aid.
Though altruistic motivations have not been examined in help rejection, the ability of humans to be other-oriented and incur costs to themselves for others is well documented in other domains. For example, Hamilton’s rule (1964) demonstrates that an organism can adaptively incur a cost when it provides a greater benefit to a genetic relative, providing a kin selection mechanism for altruism to be evolutionarily stable (Smith, 1964).Extending this model to altruistic rejection, individuals may reject aid despite the lost benefits to themselves when it protects a related helper from losing important resources. Thus, grandparents may refuse aid so that their grandchildren are not “put out,”—creating a net benefit for their family—even when they may badly need that help.
Whereas the grandparents’ case more clearly falls under the rubric of Hamilton’s rule, sometimes people appear to refuse aid even when they are not related to the helpers and would not seem to incur significant costs from accepting the help. For example, when people refuse to let a good friend give them a ride to the airport and instead pay a high fee to take a taxicab, thoughts about reciprocity and independence may be relevant, but the individual may also be genuinely concerned about taking their friend’s time or energy. Although a friend is not a genetic relative, decades of research on empathy and altruism suggest that the mechanisms of prosocial giving, which evolved in the context of close, related relationships, also promote giving to non-kin, such as when we are familiar with the other, similar to them, bonded to them, or include them in our self-concept (e.g., Batson, 2011; Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997; Preston & de Waal, 2002; Preston, 2013). When we feel empathic towards another person, we treat them more like kin and are thus more willing to help these pseudo-kin (Ackerman, Kendrick, & Schaller, 2007). Thus, it is plausible that some of the same mechanisms that allow people to altruistically offer aid to kin and non-kin also allow altruistic rejection to be extended to kin as well as non-kin.
Altruistic rejection implies a few preconditions. First, the recipient should notice that the helper is incurring a cost, which is more likely to happen when the recipient takes the perspective of the helper. Such perspective taking (and therefore awareness of the cost to the other) is more likely to occur for close, bonded, or interdependent relationships, especially if the helper is included in the recipient’s sense of self (Galinsky, Ku, & Wang, 2005). Once the cost has been noticed, the cost to the helper also must be perceived as significant enough to outweigh the benefit to the recipient. Under these conditions, altruistic rejection is most likely.
Interestingly, being close to someone should simultaneously decrease and increase the likelihood of rejecting help via different paths. Many of the self-oriented costs that have previously been studied (e.g., physical danger, status, and reciprocity) are less relevant in close relationships (Ackerman & Kendrick, 2008). For example, while one could worry that a stranger or acquaintance offering them a ride could attack them or demand usurious repayment, this is unlikely with close friends or family.However, considerations for how helpers feel or how helping will affect them should also increase in close relationships.Taken together, people should accept more help from close others if it is low in cost or would be dangerous from a stranger, but should increasingly reject aid as the costs to the helper rise.
The current studies seek to demonstrate the existence of altruistic rejection, as well as delineate some of its proximate causes and boundary conditions. We predicted that some individuals would freely report altruistic tendencies for refusing help. Furthermore, when presented with hypothetical offers of help, we predict that offers that inconvenience the helper will be rejected more than offers that are relatively more convenient. On its own, however, simply demonstrating that people reject aid that is costly to the helper is insufficient to demonstrate the existence of altruistic rejection. It is possible that inconvenient-to-give help implies a higher debt for the recipient, so even a selfish person might be concerned with how much the helper “put out.” This may not be relevant, as Greenberg (1983) found that reciprocity obligations are scaled to the size of the benefit received and not to the cost to the other. Nonetheless, if the difference in help rejection between higher-cost and lower-cost help is altruistic, then people who are higher in altruistic traits should also altruistically reject help more. Finally, we predict that altruistic rejection should be more relevant in close relationships (kin and pseudo-kin) than in peripheral relationships. In sum, when assistance is costly to the helper, people with altruistic tendencies are expected to be more likely to reject aid if that helper is emotionally close to the recipient.
Study 1
Method
Participants. We collected 216 responses via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) from the United States of America. A number of responses were dropped from the study: 13 did not complete the survey, 3 responses were duplicate participants, and 27 individuals failed either trap question, indicating that they were not attending to the survey. This left 173 participants (79 males, 94 females). Age ranged from 18-75 (M = 34.53; SD = 13.01).
Procedure. Participants were recruited online from MTurk with a short description of the research and a link to the Qualtrics survey. The study was listed as “a short survey on helping behavior.” After clicking on the link, participants read an informed consent document and electronically consented to participate in the study.
To avoid participants’ answers from being influenced by suggestions of altruistic rejection, all participants completed free response blocks first and were not allowed to return to previous sections to change their answers. The study always began by asking participants to report in a paragraph a memorable instance where they had rejected help and then, in one or two words, to report their motivations for doing so. Next, participants were given a textbox to spontaneously report all easily remembered reasons for rejecting help in general. Once the participants completed the free-response section, participants rated the extent to which 14 possible reasons, generated by the researchers, influence their decisions to accept or reject help in general, (1 Not at all, 7 Very Strongly). These motivations included both self-oriented and other-oriented reasons for rejecting help (see Appendix A)
After this, participants were presented with four vignettes in random order that described offers of help from either their mother or a coworker. Each of these vignettes also had a version that was higher or lower in cost to the helper. There were four vignette scenarios: a ride to the dentist or home from the grocery store, carrying boxes, and washing dishes at a party (see Appendix B). Each vignette had four versions varying on whether their mother or a coworker offered the help, and how inconvenient it was to give. For example, in one vignette, participants were offered help carrying a large number of packages into their house. In the higher-cost version, the helper and the recipient were both wearing nice clothes and the boxes were muddy, while in the lower-cost version both people had just returned from a hike and the boxes were merely wet.
Each vignette was randomly assigned to fill one cell of a 2(Person offering: mother, coworker) x 2(Cost to helper: higher, lower) within-subjects design. So, each participant read four vignettes, a higher- and lower-cost vignette where the mother offered help, and a higher- and lower-cost vignette where a coworker offered help. Instructions at the beginning of the block asked participants to imagine themselves as best they could in these scenarios even if the specific details were not applicable to their lives. After each story, participants rated how likely they were to accept the help in the described situation on a scale from 1 (Not at all likely)to 7 (Very likely). These scores were reverse coded to create a measure of how likely they were to reject help.
To obtain participants' individual connections to their mothers and their coworkers, we had participants fill out the Inclusion of the Other in the Self scale (IOS; Aron, Aron, & Smoller, 1992). The IOS consists of sets of circles with varying degrees of overlap, and participants choose the pair of circles that best describes their relationship with an individual or group. Circles with more overlap are coded as higher values. Included among other targets, participants rated one item for their connection to their immediate family ("i.e., mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters") and another item to someone in the same organization as them ("e.g., workplace, school, church, neighborhood"). Connection to immediate family was used to assess the connection to the mother, while connection to organizations was used for coworkers. This was included to see whether individuals who actually were more connected to the helpers (and thus more likely to perspective take) would altruistically reject help more.
We also administered some of the subscales of the abridged 30-item Penner Prosocial Personality Battery (PSB), specifically the Empathic Concern (EC), Perspective Taking (PT), and Self-Reported Altruism (SRA) subscales (Penner, 2002). The scores on these scales were summed to create a composite measure of Help Giving Motivation in order to look for connections between altruistic giving and altruistic rejection. We also included a brief demographic survey. Finally, participants were debriefed and compensated. For all analyses, α was set to .05.
Results
Participants’ free responses for a specific instance of and general reasons for rejecting help were coded in terms of containing (1) or not containing (0) an altruistic reason for rejecting help (e.g., “I don’t want to be a burden,” = 1). Two participants were not scored as they did not appear to understand the questions. 20.80% of our sample spontaneously reported altruistic motivations, and a one-sample t-test performed on these codes showed a significant difference from 0, t(170) = 6.61, p < .001.
To provide us with convergent evidence for the free-responses and with a continuous measure of the degree to which people experience prosocial motivations for refusing help, a principle components analysis (PCA) was conducted on the Survey of Help Rejection, taking all factors with eigenvalues over one. Four factors emerged, which were interpreted as Trust Concerns, Image Concerns, Altruistic Concerns, and Need Perception (see Table 1). Our factor of particular interest, Altruistic Concerns, was composed of two items, "I don't want to use up their time, money, or resources," and "I feel guilty taking their time, energy, or money."
To confirm that Altruistic Concerns scores reflected prosocial motivations, a logistic regression was used to predict the free-response codes from the four PCA factors (entered simultaneously). The two self-oriented concerns, Trust Concerns and Image Concerns, were significantly negatively predictive of free responses that were altruistic, Trust Concerns,β = -0.77, Odds Ratio (OR) = 0.46, p = .003, and Image Concerns β = -0.82, OR = 0.44, p = .001. Conversely, the Altruistic Concerns factor was significantly positively predictive of altruistic free responses, β = 1.43, OR = 4.22, p < .001. Need Perception did not significantly predict the free responses β = -0.32, p = .158. Given that the PCA factor of Altruistic Concerns continuously varies across people and predicts altruistic free responses, it was used hereafter as an individual differences measure of the tendency to perform altruistic rejection.