Collective helping and bystander effects in coevolving helping networks

Collective helping and bystander effects in coevolving helping networks.

We study collective helping behavior and bystander effects in a coevolving helping network model. A node and a link of the network represents an agent who renders or receives help and a friendly relation between agents, respectively. A helping trial of an agent depends on relations with other involved agents and its result (success or failure) updates the relation between the helper and the rec...

Young children show the bystander effect in helping situations.

Much research in social psychology has shown that otherwise helpful people often fail to help when bystanders are present. Research in developmental psychology has shown that even very young children help and that the presence of others can actually increase helping in some cases. In the current study, in contrast, 5-year-old children helped an experimenter at very high levels when they were al...

Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability

Although it has been claimed that people care more about identifiable than statistical victims, demonstrating this “identifiable victim effect” has proven difficult because identification usually provides information about a victim, and people may respond to the information rather than to identification per se. We show that a very weak form of identifiability—determining the victim without prov...

Helping Agents in VMT

In this chapter we describe ongoing work towards enabling dynamic support for collaborative learning in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) environment using state-of-the-art language technologies such as text classification and dialogue agents. The key research goal of our long-term partnership is to experimentally learn broadly applicable principles for supporting effective collaborative problem sol...

Helping in Teams