Helping Behaviour (Bierhoff)

According to the social psychologist Hans-Werner Bierhoff, helping behaviour is any action by which someone intends to benefit a particular person. It is prosocial when it is voluntary and not done out of professional duty; altruistic when it is carried by compassion and by putting oneself in the other’s position.

This entry deals with when people help, what holds them back and how help is received – not with Bierhoff’s work as a whole. For the term itself see Altruism; for the human disposition to help, the prosocial nature of human beings.

Translator’s note: Hans-Werner Bierhoff writes in German. This page quotes him verbatim in German; the English renderings in square brackets – “[our translation: …]” – are our own.

About the person. Hans-Werner Bierhoff (born 1948) is a social psychologist who taught at Ruhr University Bochum. His books Psychologie hilfreichen Verhaltens (The Psychology of Helping Behaviour, 1990) and Psychologie prosozialen Verhaltens (The Psychology of Prosocial Behaviour, 2010) are among the standard German-language works on helping.

What distinguishes helping, prosocial and altruistic behaviour?

Bierhoff arranges helping in three circles. The widest is helping behaviour: any support given to another person, including that of the paramedic who is paid for it. Within it lies prosocial behaviour – voluntary, not done out of the obligations of a professional role. Bierhoff expressly includes reciprocity here; what does the helper good may also be prosocial. In the innermost circle stands altruistic behaviour: prosocial and carried by empathy, that is, by putting oneself in the other’s situation and feeling with them.

This arrangement clears up two misunderstandings. For Bierhoff, professional helpers are not egoists: a nurse or a doctor who goes beyond what the role requires acts altruistically in his view, and lay help and professional help complement each other. And he does not define altruism by sacrifice: what matters is the motive, not how much the help costs.

Why do people sometimes fail to help when others are present?

This is the question with which research on helping came of age in the 1960s. In experiments, Bibb Latané and John Darley showed that people intervene less often and later in a staged emergency when they believe others are present too. Bierhoff sums up the explanation in three mechanisms:

1. Diffusion of responsibility: the more people are present, the less responsible each individual feels.
2. Pluralistic ignorance: everyone takes the calm of the others as a sign that nothing serious is happening – and everyone stays calm.
3. Evaluation apprehension: whoever intervenes risks embarrassing themselves in front of others.

This bystander effect is well documented in the laboratory. A meta-analysis of more than a hundred studies shows, however, that it is considerably weaker in clearly dangerous situations (Fischer et al. 2011). And everyday life looks different from the textbook picture: video recordings of public conflicts from three countries show that in nine out of ten cases someone intervenes – and more readily the more people are present (Philpot et al. 2020). Whoever is close by in an emergency and clearly recognises the situation will, as a rule, help.

What helps to overcome the inhibition is what Bierhoff calls social responsibility: the sense that it depends on oneself. D. Harald Alke expresses the same attitude in Energytraining: “We cannot leave this responsibility to someone else; we have to do it ourselves.”

Did 38 witnesses really watch in the Kitty Genovese case?

No – not in the way it was told for decades. In March 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered in New York; a newspaper report spoke of 38 neighbours who had watched and done nothing. The story became the founding example of bystander research and appeared in almost every textbook, Bierhoff’s included.

Later investigations paint a different picture: only a few people saw the attack at all, some heard only noises, at least one neighbour called for help, and a neighbour went to the dying woman (Manning, Levine & Collins 2007; Kassin 2017). Research today speaks of the “parable of the 38 witnesses”: the narrative determined which questions were asked – about inaction and group size – before field findings set the picture straight. The example is therefore less useful as evidence of indifference than as a lesson in how a story can steer a science.

Does true altruism exist?

This is the great question of social psychology – and Bierhoff’s answer is more cautious than is often attributed to him. He calls the debate over whether self-interest ultimately lies behind every act of helping a „Sackgasse“ [our translation: “dead end”]: „In der Regel sind sowohl egoistische als auch altruistische Faktoren wirksam“ [our translation: “As a rule, both egoistic and altruistic factors are at work”] (Bierhoff 2002). So he does not deny altruism; he considers the question of the pure motive undecidable.

The strongest answer comes from C. Daniel Batson. His empathy–altruism hypothesis states: whoever feels compassion for a person in need wants to help that person for their own sake – even when they could easily escape the situation. Bierhoff at first objected that the results could also be explained egoistically, for instance by the joy the helper feels at success. Batson tested precisely this explanation in his own experiments and sums up 35 years of research as strong and consistent support for his hypothesis (Batson 2011). Bierhoff now considers him „vermutlich richtig“ [our translation: “probably right”] (Fetchenhauer & Bierhoff 2004) and, together with Elke Rohmann, confirmed the hypothesis in an experiment of his own.

Bierhoff’s later books are close to the psychology of human strengths. He speaks of a „Balance zwischen Fürsorglichkeit für andere und Fürsorglichkeit für sich selbst“ [our translation: “balance between caring for others and caring for oneself”] (Bierhoff 2010) – helping that does not consume the helper.

How is help received?

Here lies what is perhaps Bierhoff’s most important contribution. Help is not automatically good for the person who receives it. Whoever cannot give anything back easily feels dependent and inferior; help can threaten self-esteem. This is why recipients sometimes react ungratefully – not because they receive too much, but because the help is one-sided and allows no return.

From this, Bierhoff and Elke Rohmann draw a clear recommendation: help that makes reciprocity possible, preserves independence and puts the other person in a position to help themselves in future – help towards self-help. Conversely, too much pressure to have to help tends to weaken the willingness to help rather than strengthen it.

Does education make people more helpful?

Not in a general sense. Bierhoff mentions „höhere Bildung“ [our translation: “higher education”] only in a narrow context: among the factors associated with voluntary commitment at the workplace, alongside satisfaction, fairness and the example set by superiors. Wider research shows why this must not be generalised: education predicts organised commitment – volunteering in associations, citizenship behaviour at work (Wilson & Musick 1997; Ng & Feldman 2009). Informal helping among neighbours, in the family, in the street, on the other hand, hardly depends on education.

Where helpfulness is measured as visible, organised commitment, the educated appear more helpful. No ranking of people follows from this – only the observation that every measurement of helping helps decide whom it recognises as helpful. Well documented, by contrast, is another connection: willingness to give to others grows with age (Cutler et al. 2021).

Our reading: help that strengthens

Social psychology leaves the question of motive open because it looks for altruism as a pure, costly motive. We read altruism as acting for others that does not exclude one’s own joy, recognition and reciprocity. A helper who is glad when things go well is no egoist in disguise; mixed motives are no disproof – and on this Bierhoff agrees with us.

The opposing position is a line of thought that defines altruism solely by the costs and suffering of the giver: only those who sacrifice themselves count as good people. This morality of suffering misses both – the helper who exhausts himself, and the recipient whom one-sided help keeps small.

In Mental Basics (1991), D. Harald Alke found a formula for this that we regard as a guiding principle: “Help should always be a guide to self-help.” And, with a well-known proverb: “Teach him to fish, and he will never go hungry again!” The point, he writes, is “to make a contribution in the right way, without generally allowing ourselves to be exploited”. Bierhoff’s research on recipients supports exactly this.

What we read differently in 2017

In Ausgewählte Perspektiven des Altruismus (Selected Perspectives on Altruism, 2017), Bierhoff still stood for a psychology that assigns professional helpers to egoism and holds true altruism to be non-existent. The original shows the opposite: Bierhoff includes reciprocity, calls professional helpers altruistic as soon as they go beyond their role, considers the question of motive open and leans towards Batson’s answer. We have corrected this reading. For us, Bierhoff is not an opponent but a witness to the fact that helping and one’s own well-being go together.

Related terms

• Altruism – the term and its interpretations
• Empathy – compassion as a motive for helping
• Prosocial nature of human beings – why humans are fundamentally disposed to help
• Reciprocity – mutuality as the basis of sustainable help
• Shared intentionality (Tomasello) – how children help of their own accord
• Veneer theory (de Waal) – whether morality is only a thin veneer

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By Tobias O. R. Alke