Severe Harm Demotivates Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

Prosocial motivations and behaviors are often crucial to the success of modern organizations. Normative theories of prosocial behavior, widely accepted by social scientists and laypeople alike, assert that prosocial behavior is motivated by concerns for others’ welfare and will increase when others face greater harm. This hypothesis, however, has never been tested under conditions of severe harm. We report results from a natural experiment combining a unique dataset of millions of time-stamped prosocial behaviors with the exogenous shocks of all major hurricanes that hit the U.S. in 2015-2018, including the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. We show that severe harm actually demotivates prosocial behavior, contrary to normative theories, but consistent with an alternative theory in which people avoid helping others when the situation feels like a