Positive Social Behavior and Morality: Social and Personal Influences, Volume I presents the broad range of influences that encourage or inhibit people to behave positively towards others and how varied forms of positive behavior are determined. The book examines the various aspects of positive social behavior. It starts by providing the definition, significance, and relationship of positive or prosocial behavior to morality. Topics on why people behave prosocially; the determinants of people helping other people in physical distress; effects of harm doing on prosocial behavior; the limitations of current methods; the goals for future study in the field of prosocial behavior; and a theoretical model for predicting prosocial behavior are presented as well. Psychologists, sociologists, researchers, and students in the field of sociology and psychology will find this book interesting.

This book brings together for the first time many if the leading writers and thinkers from the psychological and mental health fields. Contributes include Robert Jay Lifton, Joanna Macy, Roger Walsh and others.

He explores the range of experiences that lead to active bystandership, including socialization by parents, teachers (and peers) in childhood, education, experiential learning, and public education through media. He examines what personal characteristics or dispositions result from such experiences, which in turn lead to caring and helping. Staub also considers how circumstances influence people--both individuals and whole groups--and how they join with personal dispositions to determine whether people remain passive in the face of others' need or instead help others and behave in morally courageous or even heroic ways. He considers how moral and caring values can be subverted by circumstances, and outlines ways to resist that possiblity.

Are our efforts to help others ever driven solely by altruistic motivation, or is our ultimate goal always some form of self- benefit (egoistic motivation)? This volume reports the development of an empirically-testable theory of altruistic motivation and a series of experiments designed to test that theory. It sets the issue of egoism versus altruism in its larger historical and philosophical context, and brings diverse experiments into a single, integrated argument. Readers will find that this book provides a solid base of information from which questions surrounding the existence of altruistic motivation can be further investigated.

The essays selected for this volume, written by some of the worlds most respected experts on human rights, encompass the development of human rights law from its philosophical underpinnings and address many of its current controversies. The collected essays explore the drafting of major human rights instruments, including the political challenges that shaped those instruments; examine the interrelationship of various claimed rights; and identify factors producing compliance with - and violation of - human rights law. Other contributions analyze the role of non-governmental organizations in achieving better human rights protections as well as the danger of claiming too many rights, and the tension between rights and security. Contrasting viewpoints in several essays highlight some of the key conflicts in the field. An introductory essay provides a roadmap marking the collection‘s major themes, and tracing the relationship between those themes. Taken together, the essays emphasize the legal underpinnings of the human rights regime and as such, the collection provides an essential, wide-ranging account of this important part of international law, procedure and practice.

The publication of this unique three-volume set represents the culmination of years of work by a large number of scholars, researchers, and professionals in the field of moral development. The literature on moral behavior and development has grown to the point where it is no longer possible to capture the “state of the art” in a single volume. This comprehensive multi-volume Handbook marks an important transition because it provides evidence that the field has emerged as an area of scholarly activity in its own right. Spanning many professional domains, there is a striking variety of issues and topics surveyed: anthropology, biology, economics, education, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, social work, and more. By bringing together work on diverse topics, the editors have fostered a mutually-beneficial exchange not only between alternative approaches and perspectives, but also between “applied” and “pure” research interests. The Theory volume presents current and ongoing theoretical advances focusing on new developments or substantive refinements and revisions to existing theoretical frameworks. The Research volume summarizes and interprets the findings of specific, theory-driven, research programs; reviews research in areas that have generated substantial empirical findings; describes recent developments in research methodology/techniques; and reports research on new and emerging issues. The Application volume describes a diverse array of intervention projects — educational, clinical, organizational, and the like. Each chapter includes a summary report of results and findings, conceptual developments, and emerging issues or topics. Since the contributors to this publication are active theorists, researchers, and practitioners, it may serve to define directions that will shape the emerging literature in the field.

Originally published in 1989, this joint venture of American and Polish psychologists provides an international perspective on the psychological factors that make people attend to the well-being of others and of society. The individual sections focus on: theoretical perspectives in the nature of values; the development of positive values; the place of values in various types of decisions; the regulation of behaviors through values and the relation of values to behavioral outcomes; and sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and historical perspectives on values.

When and why do groups target each other for extermination? How do seemingly normal people become participants in genocide? In these essays, social psychologists use the principles derived from contemporary research in their field to try to shed light on the behaviour of perpetrators of genocide.

Published in cooperation with the Society for Personality and Social Psychology To some degree, the issues raised by social psychologists and developmentalists overlap, each of them offering unique possibilities by which to explore questions of interest. Social Development addresses this issue and attempts to foster an awareness of the interesting research on the interface of social and developmental psychology. Written by a cast of leading researchers, this volume provides a multi-level perspective on the common boundaries between social and developmental psychology with an eye toward synthesizing research from many fields including personality, education, social work, and family studies. The contributors raise questions that are often not recognized by investigators due to their lack of knowledge of work and ideas outside their own discipline. Some of the specific subjects covered are individual differences in predicting others' thoughts and feelings, naturally occurring interpersonal expectancies, self-conceptions and their development, and social development and self-monitoring. Researchers and students involved in social psychology, developmental psychology, personality, social work, family studies, sociology, and adolescence will find Social Development to be a lucid, insightful, and interesting volume.