Prosocial Judgment Research Articles

Children’s and adolescents’ judgments of the desirability and obligatoriness of prosocial action: Variations across helping, sharing, and comforting

This study examined whether the intensity of need and type of prosociality differentially predicted children’s and adolescents’ desirability, obligatoriness, and permissibility judgments of costly prosocial actions. A total of 165 8–10-year-old children and 13–15-year-old adolescents evaluated six hypothetical situations wherein one child needed to be helped, shared with, or comforted and another child decided whether or not to provide that assistance. Participants evaluated whether acting prosocially was desirable-obligatory, desirable-nonobligatory, undesirable-permissible, or undesirable-impermissible, and their reasoning was coded. Prosociality was evaluated as desirable-obligatory more in high-need situations. Overall, children more than adolescents evaluated prosociality as desirable. When the need was high, comforting more than helping and sharing was evaluated as desirable, whereas when the need was low, sharing was evaluated as particularly desirable. The reasoning underlying judgments differed across types of prosociality. Findings are discussed in relation to how varied types of need are related to children’s and adolescents’ prosocial judgments.

Nature exposure and social health: Prosocial behavior, social cohesion, and effect pathways

This paper provides an integrative review of evidence from different research areas showing that exposure to nature influences social health by evoking more prosocial judgments, decisions, and actions. Nature exposure increases prosocial behavior, decreases antisocial behavior, and increases ratings of social connection and satisfaction. Prosocial and antisocial behavior effects are observed with brief nature exposure, both actual and virtual. Social connection effects are observed with long-term nature exposure, such as neighbourhood greenspace. Several mechanisms are proposed for these effects including self-transcendent emotions, motivation, social ties, place attachment, trust, and self-regulation. This overview of the impact of nature on various factors of social health and consideration of possible causal mechanisms provides a coherent framework for designing future research and practical interventions to improve social health.

Interpersonal utility and children's social inferences from shared preferences

Similarity of behaviors or attributes is often used to infer social affiliation and prosociality. Does this reflect reasoning using a simple expectation of homophily, or more complex reasoning about shared utility? We addressed this question by examining the inferences children make from similar choices when this similarity does or does not cause competition over a zero-sum resource. Four- to six-year-olds (N = 204) saw two vignettes, each featuring three characters (a target plus two others) choosing between two types of resources. In all stories, each character expressed a preference: one ‘other’ chose the same resource as the target, while a second ‘other’ chose the different resource. In one condition there were enough resources for all the characters; in the other condition, one type of resource was limited, with only one available (inducing potential competition between the target and the similar-choice other). Children then judged which of the two ‘other’ characters was being nicer (prosocial judgment) and which of the two was more preferred by the target (affiliative inference). When resources were limited (vs. unlimited), children were less likely to select the similar other as being nice. Children's initial tendency to report that the target preferred the similar other was also eliminated in the limited resource scenario. These findings show that children's reasoning about similarity is not wholly based on homophily. Instead, by reasoning about shared utility — how each person values the goals of others — children engage in flexible inferences regarding whether others' similar preferences and behaviors have positive or negative social meaning.

Cooperative Games and Prosocial Reasoning in Children: Effects of an Intervention Program

This article presents the results of a study made with children between seven and eight years of age, with the purpose of determining the influence of cooperative on their prosocial judgment. It has a quasi-experimental design with control and experimental groups, with pre-test and post-test measurements through a pictorical scale to evaluate prosocial reasoning in the participating children, before and after the implementation of an intervention program based on cooperative games. The program had a significant impact on children's prosocial judgment, there was an increase in the frequency of children with needs-oriented and stereotyped reasoning, and a decrease in hedonistic judgment. Psychoeducational programs of this type could be used to positively influence the reasoning and prosocial behavior of children at these ages.

Autonomous vehicles: How perspective-taking accessibility alters moral judgments and consumer purchasing behavior

In preparation for unavoidable collisions, autonomous vehicle (AV) manufacturers could program their cars with utilitarian ethical algorithms that maximize the number of lives saved during a crash. However, recent research employing hypothetical AV crash scenarios reveals that people are not willing to purchase a utilitarian AV despite judging them to be morally appropriate (Bonnefon, Shariff, & Rahwan, 2016). This important result, indicating evidence for a social dilemma, has not yet been psychologically explored by behavioral scientists. In order to address the psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon, we developed and tested a novel theoretical proposal – perspective-taking accessibility (PT accessibility). Accordingly, we established that providing participants with access to both situational perspectives (AV buyers can be passengers or pedestrians) in crash scenarios, eliminated the behavioral inconsistency between their utilitarian judgments of moral appropriateness and non-utilitarian purchasing behavior. Moreover, our full PT accessibility induced respondents' utilitarian prosocial judgments and purchasing behavior (Experiments 1a and 1b) and consistent utilitarian preferences across judgment tasks (Experiment 2). Crucially, with full PT accessibility, participants' utilitarian purchasing behavior as well as their willingness to buy and ride utilitarian AVs were informed by their utilitarian moral judgments. Full PT accessibility provides the participants with even odds of being a pedestrian or passenger in crash scenarios, and thus impartiality. It could be argued that full PT accessibility is a new type of ‘veil of ignorance’, which is not based on purposely induced self-interest and uneven risk options (as in Huang, Greene, & Bazerman, 2019), but rather is based on even odds of being a passenger or pedestrian, and therefore with even 50/50 chance to die/live as passenger or pedestrian. Under these circumstances one can measure utilitarian preferences.

Children’s theory of mind as a mechanism linking parents’ mind-mindedness in infancy with children’s conscience

Growing research on parental mind-mindedness has revealed significant positive associations between parents’ appropriate mind-minded (MM) comments to their infants and children’s future theory of mind (ToM). In turn, ToM has been broadly linked with a range of social-moral competencies. However, few (if any) studies have examined long-term paths from mothers’ and fathers’ mind-mindedness in infancy to conscience at early school age, with ToM serving as a mediator of those links. We tested such a model in a prospective longitudinal study of 102 community infants, mothers, and fathers. Parents’ MM comments to their infants were coded in naturalistic interactions in snack and play contexts at 7 months. Children’s ToM was assessed in false-belief tasks at 4.5 and 5.5 years, and two aspects of their conscience were assessed at 6.5 years: discomfort following transgressions and prosocial judgments in hypothetical moral dilemmas. We tested our model in a comprehensive path analysis that accounted for developmental continuity of both aspects of conscience. Children’s ToM was positively associated with both measures of future conscience. The long-term paths from parental mind-mindedness in infancy to conscience were found for mother–child relationships only. For mothers and children, we supported the paths from maternal appropriate MM comments during a snack context in infancy to both aspects of children’s conscience mediated by children’s ToM. The findings extend earlier evidence suggesting the potentially important role of the parent–child interactive context for long-term effects of early parental mind-mindedness and highlight differences in the roles MM comments may play in mother–child and father–child relationships.

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.

Prosocial development in early adulthood: A longitudinal study.

Consistency of measures of a prosocial personality and prosocial moral judgment over time, and the interrelations among them, were examined. Participants and friends' reports of prosocial characteristics were obtained at ages 21-22, 23-24, and 25-26 years. In addition, participants' prosocial judgment was assessed with interviews and with an objective measure of prosocial moral reasoning at several ages. Reports of prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding in childhood and observations of prosocial behavior in preschool also were obtained. There was interindividual consistency in prosocial dispositions, and prosocial dispositions in adulthood related to empathy/sympathy and prosocial behavior at much younger ages. Interview and objective measures of moral reasoning were substantially interrelated in late adolescence/early adulthood and correlated with participants' and friends' reports of a prosocial disposition.

Preschool children's prosocial judgments and their reasoning in the empathic situations

The purpose of this study was to examine preschool children's prosocial judgments and their reasoning for prosocial episodes. One hundred children were individually asked to do prosocial judgments and their reasoning for three prosocial episodes: helping, sharing, and comforting. In the episode there was a crying or a normal facial expression of a person in distress under the condition of high and low empathic situations. The results indicated that the crying face and high empathic situation increased the rate of prosocial judgment more than the normal face and low empathic situation, respectively, and older children (5-year-olds) did prosocial judgment than younger ones (4-year-olds). Furthermore, the crying face induced the empathic reasoning, especially in the high empathic situation. These results supported that preschool children were able to use the empathic reasoning reflected in the negative facial expression and the cause of distress of the victim.