Pro-social Behaviour to Overcome Indivualistic Behaviour.

With all the conveniences offered by this globalization era, it is possible for a person to grow individualistic behavior. This possibility can cause human consciousness as social beings to decrease. In order to overcome this issue, UPH Psychology Village 11 is here to raise awareness about pro-social behavior. One of the ways is through a Talk Show entitled ‘Level Up Your Pro-social Behaviour!’ which was held on March 12, 2020, at UPH Lippo Village.

“Basically, pro-social behavior is a social behavior that benefits other people or society as a whole. A person with pro-social behavior will not think about profit or loss. The main reason for this behavior is the achievement of emotional self-reward and contentment from helping other people who are not of their interest,” said Dra. Eunike Sri Tyas Suci, Ph.D. – Psychologist.

There are a number of internal and external factors that can affect pro-social behavior. The internal factors include personality, gender, and mood while the external factors are in-group or out-group, urban/rural, and the number of audiences.

“In psychology, there are several types of personality, and one of them is altruist. An altruist is concerned about the happiness of others, and thus, finds joy in helping other people. In relation to gender, men would easily help others while women prefer to help gradually in a long-term phase. Mood can also influence pro-social behavior, when we are in a good mood, our sensibility to help others tends to be higher. And then, there are the external factors such as in which a person tends to help those who are within their group, or when people from the rural areas tends to be more helpful than people from the urban area, and there is also the audience factor; people tend to help less when in a crowd. This is called the bystander effect,” she explained.

Pro-social behavior can’t be separated from this digital era because most people now are using social media. Nowadays, pro-social behavior can take place in social media. For example, there are victims of natural disasters who need donations for their basic needs. Social media is an easy place to gather mass and to create a donation chain that can help these victims to get the things they need.

“However, we have to admit that upon helping others, it is important for us to think critically, to evaluate the condition and consider the impact beforehand. One of the most relatable example is the hoaxes that are shared through whatsapps groups these days. Maybe, these ‘hoax spreaders’ are just people who wanted to help and they might have this pro-social behavior. However, they do not re-examine the accuracy of this news, and they ended up spreading hoax news,” she added.

The Talk Show, which was attended by approximately 50 Psychology students of UPH (batch 2017-2019), was ended with a short film that shows the implications of pro-social behavior.


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