Human Prosociality Research Articles

Long-Term Attachments and Complex Cognition in Birds and Humans are Linked to Pre-Reproductive Prosociality and Cooperation. Constructing a Hypothesis

Human prosociality has often been regarded as an important step towards the capacity for empathy; i.e. to think of others in compassionate and caring ways. This ability, in turn, is related to social attachment. Many writers have rightly argued that, in order to understand the biology and evolution of social attachment, a comparative approach across many taxa is needed.

Assessing the validityof the Self versus other interest implicit association test.

There is great variability in the ways that humans treat one another, ranging from extreme compassion (e.g., philanthropy, organ donation) to self-interested cruelty (e.g., theft, murder). What underlies and explains this variability? Past research has primarily examined human prosociality using explicit self-report scales, which are susceptible to self-presentation biases. However, these concerns can be alleviated with the use of implicit attitude tests that assess automatic associations. Here, we introduce and assess the validity of a new test of implicit prosociality–the Self versus Other Interest Implicit Association Test (SOI-IAT)–administered to two samples in pre-registered studies: regular blood donors (Study 1; N = 153) and a nationally representative sample of Americans (Study 2; N = 467). To assess validity, we investigated whether SOI-IAT scores were correlated with explicit measures of prosociality within each sample and compared SOI-IAT scores of the control sample (representative sample of Americans) with the prosocial sample (blood donors). While SOI-IAT scores were higher in the prosocial blood donor sample, SOI-IAT scores were generally uncorrelated with explicit measures and actual prosocial behaviour. Thus, the SOI-IAT may be able to detect group differences in everyday prosociality, but future testing is needed for a more robust validation of the SOI-IAT. These unexpected findings underscore the importance of sharing null and mixed results to fill gaps in the scientific record and highlight the challenges of conducting research on implicit processes.

Green when seen? No support for an effect of observability on environmental conservation in the laboratory: a registered report.

Understanding how humans navigate the tension between selfish and prosocial behaviour is central to addressing social dilemmas and several environmental issues. Many accounts predict that human prosociality would increase in the presence of observing individuals. Previous studies on this observability effect predominantly relied on artificial observability manipulations and low-cost measures of prosociality. In the present Registered Report, we used a recently validated laboratory procedure of repeated dilemmas to test whether the presence of actual observers affects costly prosocial behaviour in the domain of environmental conservation. When completing this dilemma task, participants repeatedly chose between minimizing the length of the laboratory session and minimising wasted energy from a bank of LED lights. Their choices were made either in private or in the presence of actual observers. Contrary to our expectation, we did not observe higher rates of energy-conserving behaviour when participants' choices were being observed. Manipulation and robustness checks indicate that this lack of a finding is unlikely to be owing to arbitrary methodological choices. In view of these findings, we argue that a more comprehensive analysis of situation- and behaviour-specific consequences might be necessary to predict how particular behaviours are affected by observability.

Personality and prosocial behavior: A theoretical framework and meta-analysis.

Decades of research document individual differences in prosocial behavior using controlled experiments that model social interactions in situations of interdependence. However, theoretical and empirical integration of the vast literature on the predictive validity of personality traits to account for these individual differences is missing. Here, we present a theoretical framework that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations (i.e., exploitation, reciprocity, temporal conflict, and dependence under uncertainty) and more specific subaffordances within certain types of interdependent situations (e.g., possibility to increase equality in outcomes) that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior. To test this framework, we meta-analyzed 770 studies reporting on 3,523 effects of 8 broad and 43 narrow personality traits on prosocial behavior in interdependent situations modeled in 6 commonly studied economic games (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Prisoner's Dilemma, Public Goods Game, and Commons Dilemma). Overall, meta-analytic correlations ranged between -.18 ≤ ρ̂ ≤ .26, and most traits yielding a significant relation to prosocial behavior had conceptual links to the affordances provided in interdependent situations, most prominently the possibility for exploitation. Moreover, for several traits, correlations within games followed the predicted pattern derived from a theoretical analysis of affordances. On the level of traits, we found that narrow and broad traits alike can account for prosocial behavior, informing the bandwidth-fidelity problem. In sum, the meta-analysis provides a theoretical foundation that can guide future research on prosocial behavior and advance our understanding of individual differences in human prosociality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Why we share our cookies: Prosocial behavior from a psychological perspective.

In order to accomplish the benefits and overcome the difficulties associated with group living, societies critically depend on prosocial behaviors of their members. With various disciplines exploring the preconditions and constraints of altruism and cooperation, psychological research is concerned with the motivations that underlie human prosociality. The present paper summarizes the respective literature, starting out with an overview of the measures most commonly employed to assess prosocial tendencies in the laboratory. In short, psychologists make use of (i) questionnaires in which people rate their own traits, attitudes and behaviors, employ (ii) game theoretical paradigms that aim to enhance objectivity by means of anonymity and real monetary earnings and observe (iii) behavior in controlled, but realistically complex environments. The subsequent section addresses the issue how these measures can be structured and summarizes results of a recent study that categorized the various measurement methods. Specifically, the authors propose a framework of human prosociality that assumes three distinct motivation-based sub-components: Altruistically motivated prosocial behavior reflecting the genuine aim to enhance others' well-being, norm motivated prosocial behavior referring to the tendency to enforce social norms and self-reported prosocial behavior as the inclination to perceive and describe oneself as a good person. The third section outlines situational and personal factors that influence prosocial behavior, specifically focusing on socio-affective and socio-cognitive facets. This part demonstrates that the proposed sub-components of prosocial behavior are differentially related to some of the personal moderators, for instance to gender, cognitive skills, trait affect and narcissism, which corroborates the framework of distinct aspects of prosociality. Finally, I briefly summarize attempts to enhance prosocial behavior by altering its situational, biological or personal preconditions. The influence of meditation-based trainings has received increasing attention during the last decade, and differential effects of these interventions on the facets of prosociality further support the idea that distinct motivations drive the different behavioral tendencies.

Divine Forgiveness and Human Support for State-Sanctioned Punishment

Laurin et al. 2012b found that beliefs in powerful Gods (both in general and when made salient) reduce people's endorsement of state-sanctioned punishment. Here we investigate whether the specific manner in which a powerful God responds to moral infractions (via forgiveness or punishment) influences people's endorsement of state-sanctioned punishment. Across four studies, we explored whether endorsement of state-sanctioned punishment is increased a) when participants are primed with the notion of a forgiving (cf. punitive) God (Studies 1 & 2) and b) when beliefs in a forgiving God are made salient (Studies 3a & 3b). A forgiving God might lead people to view punishment as their responsibility rather than one to be outsourced to God. Our results revealed no evidence for effects of forgiving God primes or salient forgiving God beliefs on endorsement of state-sanctioned punishment. However we did find that both forgiving and punishing God beliefs, when salient, were significant predictors of endorsement of state-sanctioned punishment in response to a victim-directed transgression. We discuss the implications of these findings for extant theories of religious prosociality. In particular, we suggest that existing accounts of human prosociality and cooperation have underestimated the role of divine forgiveness in favour of a focus on divine punishment.

The Social Origins of Human Prosociality

From early in life, children help, comfort, and share with other people. Recent research has deepened scientific understanding of the development of prosociality—efforts to promote the welfare of others. In this article, we discuss two key insights about the emergence and early development of prosocial behavior, focusing on the development of helping. First, children’s motivations and capabilities for helping change in quality as well as quantity over the opening years of life. Specifically, helping begins in participatory activities without prosocial intent in the first year of life, becoming increasingly autonomous and motivated by prosocial intent over the second year. Second, helping emerges through bidirectional social interactions starting at birth: Caregivers and other individuals support the development of helping in a variety of ways, and young children play active roles that often influence caregiver behavior. The question now is not whether but how social interactions contribute to the development of prosocial behavior. Recent methodological and theoretical advances provide exciting avenues for future research on the social and emotional origins of human prosociality.

Unpredictable and competitive cues affect prosocial behaviors and judgments

Why natural selection would favor thoughts or behaviors that benefit others at the cost of oneself (prosociality) in humans is an intriguing question. The present studies explored two kinds of cues representing overarching environmental factors that might affect prosociality: unpredictability, which represents the variability of extrinsic threats, and competition, which represents the relevance of others' performance to one's fitness. In three experiments, we also took into account the interaction between the two environmental factors and two moderators, namely resource availability and prosocial thinking types. In each experiment, participants were exposed to cues of unpredictability and/or competition before assessment of spontaneous prosocial behaviors (Studies 1 and 2) or prosocial judgments in dual-choice dilemmas (Study 3). Results showed that unpredictable cues generally led to lower prosocial behaviors and fewer prosocial judgments (Studies 2 & 3). In contrast, competitive cues led to lower prosocial behaviors among individuals with resource disadvantages (Study 1), and when combined with unpredictable cues (Study 2). However, competition also led to higher prosocial behaviors among individuals with resource advantages (Study 1) and more prosocial judgments in response to rational, utilitarian dilemmas (Study 3). Taken together, these results indicated that human prosociality is affected by environmental factors in predictable ways.

Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools.

A key feature of human prosociality is direct transfers, the most active form of sharing in which donors voluntarily hand over resources in their possession Direct transfers buffer hunter-gatherers against foraging shortfalls. The emergence and elaboration of this behaviour thus likely played a key role in human evolution by promoting cooperative interdependence and ensuring that humans' growing energetic needs (e.g. for increasing brain size) were more reliably met. According to the strong prosociality hypothesis, among great apes only humans exhibit sufficiently strong prosocial motivations to directly transfer food. The versatile prosociality hypothesis suggests instead that while other apes may make transfers in constrained settings, only humans share flexibly across food and non-food contexts. In controlled experiments, chimpanzees typically transfer objects but not food, supporting both hypotheses. In this paper, we show in two experiments that bonobos directly transfer food but not non-food items. These findings show that, in some contexts, bonobos exhibit a human-like motivation for direct food transfer. However, humans share across a far wider range of contexts, lending support to the versatile prosociality hypothesis. Our species' unusual prosocial flexibility is likely built on a prosocial foundation we share through common descent with the other apes.

The origins of human prosociality: Cultural group selection in the workplace and the laboratory

Human prosociality toward nonkin is ubiquitous and almost unique in the animal kingdom. It remains poorly understood, although a proliferation of theories has arisen to explain it. We present evidence from survey data and laboratory treatment of experimental subjects that is consistent with a set of theories based on group-level selection of cultural norms favoring prosociality. In particular, increases in competition increase trust levels of individuals who (i) work in firms facing more competition, (ii) live in states where competition increases, (iii) move to more competitive industries, and (iv) are placed into groups facing higher competition in a laboratory experiment. The findings provide support for cultural group selection as a contributor to human prosociality.

Recent trends in evolutionary ethics: greenbeards!

In recent years, there has been growing awareness among evolutionary ethicists that systems of cooperation based upon “weak” reciprocity mechanisms (such as tit-for-tat) lack scalability, and are therefore inadequate to explain human ultrasociality. This has produced a shift toward models that strengthen the cooperative mechanism, by adding various forms of commitment or punishment. Unfortunately, the most prominent versions of this hypothesis wind up positing a discredited mechanism as the basis of human ultrasociality, viz. a “greenbeard.” This paper begins by explaining what a greenbeard is, and why evolutionary theorists are doubtful that such a mechanism could play a significant role in explaining human prosociality. It goes on to analyze several recent philosophical works in evolutionary ethics, in order to show how the suggestion that morality acts as a commitment device tacitly relies upon a greenbeard mechanism to explain human cooperation. It concludes by showing how some early scientific models in the “evolution of cooperation” literature, which introduced punishment as a device to enhance cooperation, also tacitly relied upon a greenbeard mechanism.

Moral externalization and normativity: The errors of our ways.

I respond to the many thoughtful suggestions and concerns of my commentators on a wide variety of questions. These include whether moral norms form a unified category, whether they have a distinctive phenomenology, and/or whether moral normativity is a cultural construct; whether moral externalization is necessary for correlated interaction or human prosociality; precisely how such externalization generates correlated interactions among prosocial agents; and whether there are any convincing alternative explanations for it.

Do the Right Thing: Experimental evidence that preferences for moral behavior, rather than equity or efficiency per se, drive human prosociality

AbstractDecades of experimental research show that some people forgo personal gains to benefit others in unilateral anonymous interactions. To explain these results, behavioral economists typically assume that people have social preferences for minimizing inequality and/or maximizing efficiency (social welfare). Here we present data that cannot be explained by these standard social preference models. We use a “Trade-Off Game” (TOG), where players unilaterally choose between an equitable option and an efficient option. We show that simply changing the labelling of the options to describe the equitable versus efficient option as morally right completely reverses the correlation between behavior in the TOG and play in a separate Dictator Game (DG) or Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD): people who take the action framed as moral in the TOG, be it equitable or efficient, are much more prosocial in the DG and PD. Rather than preferences for equity and/or efficiencyper se, our results suggest that prosociality in games such as the DG and PD are driven by a generalized morality preference that motivates people to do what they think is morally right.

Neural bases of ingroup altruistic motivation in soccer fans

Humans have a strong need to belong to social groups and a natural inclination to benefit ingroup members. Although the psychological mechanisms behind human prosociality have extensively been studied, the specific neural systems bridging group belongingness and altruistic motivation remain to be identified. Here, we used soccer fandom as an ecological framing of group membership to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying ingroup altruistic behaviour in male fans using event-related functional magnetic resonance. We designed an effort measure based on handgrip strength to assess the motivation to earn money (i) for oneself, (ii) for anonymous ingroup fans, or (iii) for a neutral group of anonymous non-fans. While overlapping valuation signals in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) were observed for the three conditions, the subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC) exhibited increased functional connectivity with the mOFC as well as stronger hemodynamic responses for ingroup versus outgroup decisions. These findings indicate a key role for the SCC, a region previously implicated in altruistic decisions and group affiliation, in dovetailing altruistic motivations with neural valuation systems in real-life ingroup behaviour.

The Structure of Human Prosociality Revisited

In a recent publication, we employed factor analyses to integrate 14 measures of prosocial behavior, proposing four subcomponents of human prosociality: altruistically motivated, norm motivated, strategically motivated, and self-reported prosocial behavior. However, the reported confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) yielded standardized regression weights above 1, resulting from an improper solution (Heywood cases), which precludes straightforward interpretation of results. Here, we present two adjusted CFA models that rectify this problem. Model 1 resolves the issue of Heywood cases by implementing equality constraints, yielding a four-factor structure that is largely similar to the original model. Model 2 accommodates additional methodological considerations and presents a revised structure of prosociality with three subcomponents: altruistically motivated, norm motivated, and self-reported prosocial behavior. We also report minor corrections of descriptive results, none of which alter the pattern of results and interpretations of the original publication.

The Arts as a Catalyst for Human Prosociality and Cooperation

We tested the hypothesis that engagement in the arts may act as a catalyst that promotes prosocial cooperation. Using “Understanding Society” data (a nationally representative longitudinal sample of 30,476 people in the UK), we find that beyond major personality traits, demographic variables, wealth, education, and engagement in other social activity (sports), people’s greater engagement with the arts predicts greater prosociality (volunteering and charitable giving) over a period of 2 years. The predictive effect of prosociality on subsequent arts engagement is significantly weaker. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the arts provide an important vehicle for facilitating a cohesive and sustainable society. Fostering a society in which engagement in the arts is encouraged and accessible to all may provide an important counter to economic, cultural, and political fracture and division.

Will the Real Factors of Prosociality Please Stand Up? A Comment on Böckler, Tusche, and Singer (2016)

Based on a large individual differences study, Böckler, Tusche, and Singer aimed to develop and psychometrically evaluate measurement procedures that capture individual differences in multiple facets of human prosociality. Böckler et al. claimed that they identified four reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality: altruistically motivated prosocial behavior, norm-motivated prosocial behavior, strategically motivated prosocial behavior, and self-reported prosocial behavior. We show that this claim is not supported by the data. The abnormalities of the factor solution are visible in reported standardized loadings much larger than unity and negative residual variances at the indicator level. Additionally, the strong dispersion in factor loadings reported in the article hinders factor interpretation. We reanalyze the correlation matrices and propose a model with one overarching prosociality factor and a specific factor for game-theoretical conflicts. This simpler model is a more sustainable representation of prosocial behavior.

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

ABSTRACTSelection pressures to better understand others’ thoughts and feelings are seen as a primary driving force in human cognitive evolution. Yet might the evolution of social cognition be more complex than we assume, with more than one strategy towards social understanding and developing a positive pro-social reputation? Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others’ thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. ‘Traits of autism’ may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependence of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks.

Prosocial Behavior Increases with Age across Five Economic Games

Ontogenic studies of human prosociality generally agree on that human prosociality increases from early childhood through early adulthood; however, it has not been established if prosociality increases beyond early adulthood. We examined a sample of 408 non-student residents from Tokyo, Japan, who were evenly distributed across age (20–59) and sex. Participants played five economic games each separated by a few months. We demonstrated that prosocial behavior increased with age beyond early adulthood and this effect was shown across all five economic games. A similar, but weaker, age-related trend was found in one of three social value orientation measures of prosocial preferences. We measured participants’ belief that manipulating others is a wise strategy for social success, and found that this belief declined with age. Participants’ satisfaction with the unilateral exploitation outcome of the prisoner’s dilemma games also declined with age. These two factors—satisfaction with the DC outcome in the prisoner’s dilemma games and belief in manipulation—mediated the age effect on both attitudinal and behavioral prosociality. Participants’ age-related socio-demographic traits such as marriage, having children, and owning a house weakly mediated the age effect on prosociality through their relationships with satisfaction with the DC outcome and belief in manipulation.

The Structure of Human Prosociality

Prosocial behavior is crucial for functioning societies. However, its reliable scientific assessment and the understanding of its underlying structure are still a challenge. We integrated 14 paradigms from diverse disciplines to identify reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality; 329 participants performed game theoretical paradigms and hypothetical distribution tasks commonly used in behavioral economics and completed interactive computer tasks and self-reports typically employed in psychology. Four subcomponents of prosociality were identified by exploratory factor analysis and verified by confirmatory factor analysis in an independent sample: altruistically motivated prosocial behavior, norm motivated prosocial behavior, strategically motivated prosocial behavior, and self-reported prosocial behavior. Altruistically motivated behavior was related to gender, to enhanced cognitive skills, and to reduced negative affect. Our study provides a crucial step toward an overarching framework on prosocial behavior that will benefit future research on predictors, neural underpinnings, and plasticity of human cooperation and prosociality.