Help that helps: Exploring strategic motivations in intergroup helping transactions

This chapter considers how our understanding of intergroup helping transactions can be enhanced through attending to issues of strategy. First, we examine how ingroup members may help outgroup members as a way to manage and enhance the outgroup’s image of the ingroup. Second, we consider how similar image-related concerns may impact on the decision to seek or refuse help from outgroup members. Third, we consider the strategic construction of social identities and how these might promote helping and help-seeking. In doing so, we not only consider how social identity processes impact upon the proffering and acceptance of help, but we also explore how the discursive characterisation of ‘helping’ may feature in the strategic construction of group relations and social identities. Taken together, these strands highlight two different strategic dimensions to intergroup helping and help-seeking. The first concerns the use of intergroup helping transactions as a means to manage group reputation, while the second concerns the use of such transactions as a way to define group identity. We conclude by considering the implications of these observations for how acts of helping and help-seeking are conceptualised and understood, and how such understandings could be used to promote both behaviours in real-world contexts.