Abstract
Acute stress is believed to lead to prosocial behaviors via a “tend-and-befriend” pattern of stress response. However, the results of the effect of acute stress on prosocial behavior are inconsistent. The current study explores the moderating effect of gender and social value orientation on the relationship between acute stress and individuals’ pure prosocial behaviors (i.e., pure prosociality and prosocial third-party punishment). Specifically, eighty-one participants were selected and underwent the Trier Social Stress Test (or were in the control group), followed by the third-party punishment task and the dictator game. The results showed that, in general, the main effect of condition or respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity on individual prosocial behaviors was significant and did not vary between genders. Furthermore, social value orientation (i.e., prosocial or self-orientation) might moderate the impact of RSA reactivity on the amount of punishment in the third-party punishment task. That is, individuals with self-orientation exhibited more prosocial third-party punishment as RSA reactivity decreased, while the effect did not occur for individuals with prosocial orientation. Taken together, the findings of the current study provide further evidence for the “tend-and-befriend” hypothesis and highlight the underlying physical mechanisms as well as the individual dependence of the effect of psychosocial stress on individuals’ pure prosocial behaviors.
Highlights
Stress is a common phenomenon in modern society
The findings of the current study revealed that acute psychological stress affected pure prosociality and prosocial third-party punishment, which were conceptualized as donations in the dictator game and the frequency and amount of punishment in the third-party punishment task
Consistent with the results of previous studies, the results of the present study showed that compared with their counterparts under the resting control condition, those participants exposed to acute psychological stress were more generous in dictator games and tended to give the proposer more frequent and amounts punishment to maintain fairness in the third-party punishment task
Summary
Stress is a common phenomenon in modern society. Exposure to stress changes individuals’ allostasis and leads to physiological responses that involve rapid and quick engagement of the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) axis and a slow (peaking 21–40 min later) hypothalamic– pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). Acute stress exposure affects individual cognition and alters decision-making behaviors in social situations (Pechtel and Pizzagalli, 2011; von Dawans et al, 2021). Cannon (1932) posited the “fight-orflight” hypothesis to characterize the physical and psychological responses to stress from an evolutionary perspective. Individuals tended to exhibit fewer prosocial behaviors and more fighting or flighting to the threat to enhance the likelihood of survival. Researchers have recently questioned whether the “fight-or-flight” hypothesis could generalize to all social contexts
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