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Paying it forward: how helping others can reduce the psychological threat of receiving help
Author(s) -
Alvarez Katherina,
Leeuwen Esther
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/jasp.12270
Subject(s) - anticipation (artificial intelligence) , psychology , autonomy , competence (human resources) , dependency (uml) , social psychology , helping behavior , personal autonomy , applied psychology , systems engineering , artificial intelligence , computer science , political science , law , engineering
This paper shows that receiving help could be psychologically harmful for recipients, and passing on help to others after receiving help (“helping forward”) is a good strategy to improve and restore help recipients' self‐competence. Participants ( N = 87) received autonomy‐ or dependency‐oriented help and anticipated helping forward or not. Compared to receiving autonomy‐oriented help, receiving dependency‐oriented help negatively affected participants' self‐competence and their evaluation of the helper. Anticipation of future helping increased the liking for and evaluation of the helper. After paying help forward, participants felt more self‐competent than before helping, and this effect was more pronounced among former recipients of dependency‐oriented help. These results show that helping forward can negate the psychological threat associated with receiving help.