A meta‐analytic review of help giving and aggression from an attributional perspective: Contributions to a general theory of motivation

By U. Rudolph, S. Roesch, Tobias Greitemeyer, B. Weiner. 2004

400 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present review syntheses 64 investigations on the determinants of helping and aggression involving more than 12,000 subjects, providing empirical tests of Weiner's (1986, 1995) theory of social conduct. A meta‐analytic test of the proposed causal cognition‐emotion‐behaviour sequence reveals that judgements of responsibility determine the emotional reactions of anger and sympathy, and that these emotional reactions, in turn, directly influence help giving and aggression. Results are highly consistent across several potential moderator variables including type of culture, sample characteristics, publication year, and publication status. Moreover, the present analyses suggest that the hypothesised model holds true for real events as well as for simulated data. Exploratory comparisons between the helping versus the aggression domain suggest that comparable results are obtained for these two domains, except that perceptions of responsibility are more likely to exert an additional proximal role in aggressive retaliation as compared to help giving. The implications of these findings for a general theory of motivation in the interpersonal and the intrapersonal domains are discussed.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec37baaa696d69c8888a8e06108499d790e92813

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In Information Systems and Management

In Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

The Structure of Human Prosociality (2016, background): “Negative state affect has previously been linked to decreased altruistic behavior (Rudolph et al., 2004), suggesting that emotional distress in the face of another’s suffering results in withdrawal from—instead of helping—the suffering person (Batson, 2011).”
The influence of the fear facial expression on prosocial responding (2007, background): “Moreover, the impression of helplessness reinforces an expresser's lack of responsibility for his or her plight, an impression that is a strong predictor of the likelihood of perceivers’ experiencing sympathy and the desire to help (Rudolph, Roesch, Greitemeyer, & Weiner, 2004 ).”
Abusive supervision and workplace deviance and the moderating effects of negative reciprocity beliefs. (2007, methodology): “We used a shortened 5-item version of Tepper’s (2000) Abusive Supervision measure.”
Emotions Matter in Crisis (2011, background): “, anger and schadenfreude), the less likely publics are to report behavioral intentions that are supportive of an organization (Coombs & Holladay, 2004; Rudolph et al., 2004).”
Emotional and behavioral reactions to social undermining: A closer look at perceived offender motives (2009, background): “This allows a test of the unique importance of perceived motives, over and above whether an offense was intentional versus accidental.”