Which Measures of Beliefs About Others’ Prosociality Predict Prosocial Behavior in Economic Games?

Abstract

Prosocial behavior often entails the possibility to be exploited by other people. Correspondingly, situations affording prosocial behavior are often characterized by one’s dependence on others’ unknown behavior. In such situations, actors will arguably assess the risk of being taken advantage of by others before making a decision. Thus, prosocial behavior might be shaped by how prosocial actors generally believe others to be (e.g., trustworthy vs. exploitative). However, a recent investigation found no consistent evidence that perceiver effects, which describe interindividual differences in judging others’ personality in first impressions and thus capture beliefs about others’ prosociality, predict prosocial behavior (Rau et al., 2020). We replicate and extend these findings by pursuing two approaches to examine the influence of beliefs about others’ prosociality on behavior in four behavioral games (public goods game, trust game as trustor and trustee, mind game), two of which involve dependence on others under uncertainty. In our main study (N = 962), perceiver effects failed to predict prosocial behavior. This was confirmed by a meta-analysis of all studies that investigated this relation, providing strong evidence against the predictive validity of perceiver effects for behavior in economic games. In a follow-up analysis, generalized expectations (as measured by generalized trust) predicted prosocial behavior in one of the two relevant games while controlling for honesty-humility, which we interpret as tentative evidence for the role of generalized expectations in prosocial behavior in economic games. We contemplate that the discrepancy between perceiver effects and generalized expectations as measures of beliefs about others’ prosociality might be attributable to their implicit vs. explicit nature and suggest future research to explore whether perceiver effects predict more implicit measures of prosocial behavior.