“Will I be judged harshly after trying to help but causing more troubles?” A misprediction about help recipients

Abstract

competence. Afterwards, helpers predicted help recipients’ reactions, whereas help recipients rated their own reactions. The results showed that helpers underestimated help recipients’ ratings of warmth and competence in the failure condition and that this underestimation accounted for the overestimation of help recipients’ negative reactions. In Study 5, we recorded participants’ real-time thoughts during their prediction or rating process. We found that helpers considered their competence (warmth) earlier and more (later and less) than help recipients, indicating that helpers focused more on their competence and less on their warmth when making predictions about help recipients than help recipients did. The query order and content accounted for the overestimation of help recipients’ negative reactions in the failure condition. We show that people who try to help others but eventually cause more troubles mispredict the reactions of help recipients. Helpers overestimate the negative consequences (underestimate the positive consequences) of their behaviors to help recipients. We also reveal the underlying mechanism of this misprediction that helps recipients pay more attention to helpers’ warmth and less attention to helpers’ competence compared to helpers’ predictions about help recipients. Understanding this misprediction helps alleviate the concerns of helpers when they are intended to offer help but actually do harm to others and helps promote subsequent helping behaviors.