Browsing by Subject "Helping"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    How Helping Can Reinforce or Attenuate Status Inequalities: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations
    (RSF, 2022-11-01) Benjamin, Lehn M.; School of Philanthropy
    This article examines one type of social exchange that signals status: giving and receiving help. I focus on formal helping exchanges between staff and participants in nonprofit organizations. Bringing together status theory with research from social psychology on receiving help and studies of nonprofits, I identify how the helping exchanges in these settings can reinforce or attenuate status hierarchies with important consequences for participants. I examine three attenuation practices (sharing control, establishing commonalities, and questioning causes) and three practices that can reinforce status hierarchies (asserting control, reinforcing differences, and assuming causes) to show how status processes play a powerful but unexamined role in the very places dedicated to addressing inequality.
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    “I Am So Angry I Could . . . Help!” The nature of Empathic Anger
    (2018) Bringle, Robert G.; Hedgepath, Ashley; Wall, Elizabeth
    Empathy is widely viewed as a precursor to civic engagement, a mediator of other responses during civic engagement, and an outcome resulting from civic engagement. However, empathic sadness is can be biased toward helping a lone victim, a member of an in-group, a person who is physically nearby, and an individual who is personally identified. Alternatively, empathic anger occurs when an observer experiences anger, rather than sadness, on behalf of a victim as the basis for inferring social injustice and for taking action. Empathic anger represents an untapped dimension of motivation that is not captured within other approaches to motives for civic engagement. This article details three studies which found that those reporting higher empathic anger were altruistic, not aggressive, oriented toward advocacy rather than charitable service, nonprejudicial, endorsed a social justice perspective, and active in communities outside (and independent) of campus activities. Implications for future research on motives for civic engagement are presented as well as implications for designing service-learning courses to promote empathic anger as a basis for action directed at social justice issues.