The relation between bystanders’ behavioral reactivity to distress and later helping behavior during a violent conflict in virtual reality

PLOS ONE, Nov 2019

The occurrence of helping behavior is thought to be automatically triggered by reflexive reactions and promoted by intuitive decisions. Here, we studied whether reflexive reactions to an emergency situation are associated with later helping behavior in a different situation, a violent conflict. First, 29 male supporters of F.C. Barcelona performed a cued-reaction time task with a low and high cognitive load manipulation, to tap into reflexive and reflective processes respectively, during the observation of an emergency. Next, participants entered a bar in Virtual Reality and had a conversation with a virtual fellow supporter. During this conversation, a virtual Real Madrid supporter entered and started an aggressive argument with the fellow supporter that escalated into a physical fight. Verbal and physical interventions of the participant served as measures of helping behavior. Results showed that faster responses to an emergency situation during low, but not during high cognitive load, were associated with more interventions during the violent conflict. However, a tendency to describe the decision to act during the violent conflict as intuitive and reflex-like was related to more interventions. Further analyses revealed that a disposition to experience sympathy, other-oriented feelings during distressful situations, was related to self-reported intuitive decision-making, a reduced distance to the perpetrator, and higher in the intervening participants. Taken together, these results shed new light on helping behavior and are consistent with the notion of a motivational system in which the act of helping is dependent on a complex interplay between intuitive, reflexive and deliberate, reflective processes.

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The relation between bystanders’ behavioral reactivity to distress and later helping behavior during a violent conflict in virtual reality

April The relation between bystanders' behavioral reactivity to distress and later helping behavior during a violent conflict in virtual reality Ruud Hortensius 0 1 Solène Neyret 1 Mel Slater 1 Beatrice de Gelder 1 0 Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Glasgow , Glasgow, Scotland , United Kingdom , 2 Brain and Emotion Laboratory, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, EV Maastricht, The Netherlands, 3 Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology (EVENT) Laboratory, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona , Barcelona, Spain, 4 Instituci o Catalana de Recerca i Estudis AvancËats (ICREA), Barcelona , Spain , 5 Department of Computer Science, University College London , London, England , United Kingdom , 6 Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town , J-Block , Groote Schuur Hospital , Observatory, Cape Town , South Africa 1 Editor: Alessio Avenanti, University of Bologna , ITALY The occurrence of helping behavior is thought to be automatically triggered by reflexive reactions and promoted by intuitive decisions. Here, we studied whether reflexive reactions to an emergency situation are associated with later helping behavior in a different situation, a violent conflict. First, 29 male supporters of F.C. Barcelona performed a cued-reaction time task with a low and high cognitive load manipulation, to tap into reflexive and reflective processes respectively, during the observation of an emergency. Next, participants entered a bar in Virtual Reality and had a conversation with a virtual fellow supporter. During this conversation, a virtual Real Madrid supporter entered and started an aggressive argument with the fellow supporter that escalated into a physical fight. Verbal and physical interventions of the participant served as measures of helping behavior. Results showed that faster responses to an emergency situation during low, but not during high cognitive load, were associated with more interventions during the violent conflict. However, a tendency to describe the decision to act during the violent conflict as intuitive and reflex-like was related to more interventions. Further analyses revealed that a disposition to experience sympathy, other-oriented feelings during distressful situations, was related to self-reported intuitive decision-making, a reduced distance to the perpetrator, and higher in the intervening participants. Taken together, these results shed new light on helping behavior and are consistent with the notion of a motivational system in which the act of helping is dependent on a complex interplay between intuitive, reflexive and deliberate, reflective processes. - Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/ 2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement number 295673 (BdG) and ERC project TRAVERSE 227985 (MS) and an Erasmus+ staff mobility grant (RH). Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Functional altruism and socially motivated helping, behaviors that benefits the recipient but with a cost to the actor, are observed throughout the animal kingdom [ 1 ]. Humans as young as 12 to 14 months provide help [2±4]. Chimpanzees demonstrate costly helping in a variety of situations with and without reward [ 2,3,5,6 ]. There is also considerable evidence that rats exhibit helping behavior [7±12] and there is even evidence of functional altruism in ants [13± 15]. The debate is ongoing whether all of these costly behaviors can be interpreted as a form of empathy [ 16,17 ], but the crucial point is the occurrence of helping behavior. The fact that helping behavior is so widespread suggests the presence, at least at some level, of a phylogenetically ancient mechanism that gives rise to the variety of prosocial and empathic behaviors in humans [ 18,19 ]. Indeed, a recent theoretical model highlights offspring care [ 20 ] as a possible hard-wired, evolutionarily conserved mechanism that provides the foundation for helping behavior and other functional altruistic behaviors. Importantly, as the species that show helping behavior differ greatly in cognitive capacities, it is unlikely that these capacities play a crucial role in the preparation and execution of helping behavior. Thus, the occurrence of helping behavior is likely to be relatively independent of cognitive abilities and to rely more on automatically triggered fixed-action patterns [ 20,21 ]. Is helping behavior a reflexive action? Statements by people that provided help under extreme circumstances are rated as automatic and reflex-like, rather than deliberate or reflective [ 22 ]. Studies directly manipulating dec (...truncated)


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Ruud Hortensius, Solène Neyret, Mel Slater, Beatrice de Gelder. The relation between bystanders’ behavioral reactivity to distress and later helping behavior during a violent conflict in virtual reality, PLOS ONE, 2018, Volume 13, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196074