Description
Helping literature proposes positive outcomes for voluntary helping behavior. However, forced helping behavior is rarely explored. The purpose of this study is to examine the potential negative outcomes of forced helping behavior and whether individual differences affect these outcomes. Data for this thesis came from the Helping and Stress study. Data were collected from 123 undergraduate students from a large, public university in the Southwestern United States. The average participant age was 20.14 (SD = 3.54) and the average tenure was 3.35 years (SD = 3.98). Participants in this study completed multiple surveys and a LEGO helping task. The surveys measured demographic information, the strain outcomes of stress, anxiety, positive affect, and negative affect, and motivation for helping behavior. For the LEGO task, the participant was assigned as the “Helper” and had to help a confederate build a LEGO model. Four path-analytic models were tested using Mplus to explore the partial mediation between prosocial orientation, motivation for helping, and strain outcomes. To assess whether forced helping caused a change in the outcomes, latent difference scores were used. The study found a significant positive relationship between prosocial orientation and motivation to help, as well as a significant positive relationship between prosocial orientation and change in stress. However, I hypothesized that motivation to help would be a partial mediator between prosocial orientation and strain outcomes, and no mediation hypotheses were supported. Exploratory analyses indicated motivation to help sometimes acted as a moderator of the relationship between prosocial orientation and outcomes. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that helping someone of the same gender could lead to decreased anxiety. This appears to be one of the first studies examining effects of forced helping, and a good experimental manipulation for forced helping in a lab has not yet been established. These results may indicate that the forced helping task manipulation was not strong enough to cause expected effects. However, this manipulation can serve as a starting point for future study designs. Future studies could also explore motivation to help as a moderator instead of a mediator in the specific context of forced helping.
