Who Are You More Likely to Help? The Effects of Expected Outcomes and Regulatory Focus on Prosocial Performance.

Fengqiu Xiao,Zhiwei Zheng,Heyi Zhang,Ziqiang Xin,Yinghe Chen,Yiwei Li,Andreas B Eder

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165717

Abstract

Prosocial behavior refers to a broad category of actions that benefit other people or the society. Compared with other factors that affect prosocial performance, prosocial outcomes, consisting of prosocial gains and prosocial non-losses have received less attention up to now. In the current research, we explored the influences of different types of expected outcomes and regulatory focus on prosocial performance. Studies 1a and 1b examined the differences in prosocial performance elicited by prosocial gain (e.g., enhancing others’ access to clean water) and prosocial non-loss outcomes (e.g., protecting others from suffering dirty water). We found that the expected prosocial non-loss outcomes induced greater prosocial performance compared with the expected prosocial gain outcomes. Studies 2a and 2b examined the effects of dispositional and situational regulatory focus on prosocial loss aversion. We found that differences in prosocial performance between two expected prosocial outcomes were reduced when promotion focus was primed; whereas a primed prevention focus did not significantly increase this difference. Additionally, participants displayed a greater prosocial loss aversion in the prevention focus condition than in the promotion focus condition. The reason for the non-significant interaction between regulatory focus and expected prosocial outcome was discussed.

Highlights

Prosocial behavior refers to a broad category of actions that benefit other people or the society that we lives in, such as helping, comforting, sharing, cooperation, philanthropy, and community service [1]
This result suggests individuals tend to help others avoid negative outcomes rather than to attain positive outcomes. Given that this survey only investigated the preference for expected prosocial outcomes, Study 1b was performed to further examine the differences between the degrees of individuals’ willingness to help for prosocial gain and prosocial non-loss outcomes
Loss aversion occurred in the prosocial domain, which is in line with previous research results [11]

Summary

Introduction

Prosocial behavior refers to a broad category of actions that benefit other people or the society that we lives in, such as helping, comforting, sharing, cooperation, philanthropy, and community service [1]. A wide range of factors, including individual differences, situational variables, and outcome-related variables of prosocial behavior, have been found to influence prosocial behavior. Previous research has primarily focused on either the demographic and individual characteristics of the helper [1,2,3] or situational factors [4,5,6]; less attention has been paid to the roles of outcome-related variables. Prosocial Loss Aversion and Regulatory Focus analysis, and interpretation of the data, in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to submit the paper for publication

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Discussion

Conclusion