An Unstudied Region of Helping: An Extension of the Pearce-Amato Cognitive Taxonomy

An extension of the Pearce-Amato (1980) cognitively-based typology of helping is presented. First, an exhaustive list of helping verb categories was compiled. Subjects then assigned a representative sample of helpingforms derivedfrom the literature to these categories. For verb categories with no good examples represented in the helping literature, exemplary forms were constructed. These new forms were included with earlier helping forms from the Pearce-Amato study in a multidimensional scaling analysis. An additional dimension emerged, which was best described (using regression techniques) as vs. anonymous help. A randomly selected sample of 123 studies of prosocial behavior were then mapped into the multidimensional space on the basis of the helping measure used, confirming that the personal region of helping has been largely neglected by social psychologists.