Making online messages of support benefits motivated helpers with low social connectedness, low perceived impact of helping, and with both high and low relatedness to the beneficiary

Abstract

Although there has been much research into the benefits of helping for volunteers and activists, my research focused on the conditions under which helping brings benefit to helpers and whether helping leads to further helping. Due to the vast numbers of people in the world needing help and the many people helping them, it is vital to know when the well-being of the helper is enhanced as well-being is an important resource in itself and also because it can promote further engagement in helping thus creating a virtuous circle. I was particularly interested in the benefits of helping to helpers in the context of intergroup relations and whether such benefits could stimulate a commitment to help a needy group. I proposed a model of the benefits of intergroup helping called the HOPEFUL model: Helping Others Promotes Engagement and FULfillment. In the model, helping another group leads to psychological and social-psychological benefits for the helper, which both lead to more helping. The psychological benefits reflect psychological well-being and the social-psychological benefits reflect a positive social identification. In the model, these outcomes, however, are expected to occur under certain conditions: that the helper be autonomously motivated, that the helper have high sense of connection to the recipient, that the helper be low in psycho-social resources, and that the helper perceive that their helping will have a positive impact. The form of helping in my studies was online helping that took the form of scripting and recording a video message of support for survivors of great trauma. I conducted three studies in Sydney, Australia in 2018-2019 (N = 131), 2020 (N = 159), and 2021 (N = 82) in which young Australian students provided online messages of support in response to messages of hope from survivors of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. In line with previous results, meta-analyses of the studies showed that the psychological benefits of helping flowed to autonomously motivated helpers and helpers who had a high sense of connection to the beneficiary. Also in line with previous studies, those who were low in the psycho-social resource of social connectedness reaped the benefits of helping, although unlike in previous research the benefits were social-psychological benefits (mainly increased social identification).

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English