Altruistic Helping Theory

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One of the reason that humans act in immoral ways is because they are in a situation of obedience under a figure of authority or in order to gain acceptance by peers. In the obedience experiment conducted by Milgram, the experimenter, who was wearing a lab coat to show a symbol of status, asked the teacher to administer an electric shock to the student whenever the student got an answer wrong and the more answers the student got wrong, the higher the voltage. When the student began to scream in pain is when most of the teachers began to question their actions and would ask to stop, then the experimenter would insist that they continue, which they did, even though the actions were against teachers morals. The fact that the teachers continued …show more content…
Psychologist Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg developed two theories that he believes are the reasons that humans perform kind acts toward others: the Altruistic Helping Theory and the Self-Interested Helping Theory. The Altruistic Helping Theory suggests that we should help others because you empathise with them and suggests that humans will sometimes act in good moral simply because they themselves have been in a similar situation. An example of this is when you donate food or spare change to a homeless person. You obviously don’t expect a tangible reward that you can trade in, but you help them because you have probably been poor or hungry at some point in your life. Contrary to the Altruistic Helping Theory is the Self-Interested Helping Theory. This theory claims that the reason we help people is because we believe that it could benefit ourselves more than the recipient, whether in a tangible reward or self gratification. A scenario where this could happen is if you saw a cat on the side of the road that matched the picture on the lost cat poster that claimed to give a $100 reward. When you returned the cat you would feel a sense of gratification because you helped someone find their cat but you would feel more excited about the fact that you now have $100. As much as we like to believe that all of our kind
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