Promotive Tension: The Basis of Prosocial Behavior from a Lewinian Perspective¹

Abstract

Three categories of tension are identified as potential correspondents of psychological forces: tension arising from own needs, from induced needs, from the need to satisfy impersonal demands. To these, a fourth is added in which tensions are coordinated to someone else's desire to locomote toward or away from a region in his life space. From this Lewinian perspective, altruism and other less dramatic forms of prosocial behavior are part of a general theoretical question: What conditions determine whether individuals develop tension systems coordinated to another's goal attainment? The process by which tension is coordinated to another person's goal attainment is here called promotive tension arousal. Conditions that determine whether promotive tension arousal produces behavior that facilitates or hinders another's goal attainment are discussed.

Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses

“…Nor can the racial bias in empathic neural responses be accounted for by in-group advantage in emotion recognition (Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002) because empathic neural responses were defined by contrasting of painful and non-painful stimuli applied to faces with neutral expressions. As race helps defining in-group/out-group members (Cosmides et al, 2003), our fMRI results support the view that shared common membership enhances a perceiver's empathic concerns for others (Hornstein, 1978). Empathy consists of both affective components (e.g., emotional sharing) and cognitive components (e.g., perspective taking) (Decety and Jackson, 2006;Fan and Han, 2008) and the ACC mainly contributes to the affective component of empathy (Singer et al, 2004).…”

“…However, the empathic neural responses are modulated by affective link between individuals (Singer et al, 2006) and top-down attention to painful cues in stimuli (Gu and Han, 2007;Fan and Han, 2008). In addition, empathy may be influenced by social relationship between individuals such that empathic concerns increase if a perceiver and a target share common membership in a social category (Hornstein, 1978). The evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from research that measured subjective reports of empathic concern.…”

Interpersonal attraction, social identification and psychological group formation

“…The dependent measures questionnaire contained three distinct categories of measures of group behavior, and specific questions were selected on the basis of empirical precedent and/or theoretical notions concerning group behaviour. The conative measures were altruism (Hornstein, 1972), cooperation (Sherif, 1966), and eagerness to get to know ingroup members. Affective measures concerned trust, respect, and liking for the ingroup, and also a measure of closeness with ingroup members (cf.…”

Aid in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Inferences of Secondary Emotions and Intergroup Helping

“…People are more likely to help an ingroup member than an outgroup member (Hornstein, 1978;Levine, Prosser, Evans, & Reicher, 2005;Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). The present research aims to shed light on why people display an intergroup helping bias, by examining how people's inferences about the emotional states of victims may both trigger and impede helping responses to outgroups.…”