Category: Prosocial Behavior

Prosocial behavior, or behaviors intended to help other people, is a research area for psychologists seeking to understand what motivates and under what contexts people engage in these behaviors. Religion is a phenomenon that is present in every culture, and most have an aspect of prosociality. Many religions have dominating notions of sharing, donating, and helping others support the image of righteousness. However, this may not be a universal phenomenon, as the relationship between religiosity and prosociality sometimes have contradictory results, challenging the common assumption that religious people are more likely to help than others.

Shariff and Norenzayan (2007) conducted two studies to explore whether religion increases prosocial behavior, using the anonymous dictator game. The first study aimed to implicitly prime God concepts in subjects and then examine how this affected their generosity. The second study built on the first study, with the main variation introducing “an additional priming condition to examine the strength of the religious prime relative to a prime of secular institutions of morality” (p. 803). Unlike prior research that relied on studying prosocial behavior and religiosity using correlational designs, this study aimed to activate God concepts implicitly, as well as use a paradigm of cooperative behavior instead of relying on participants’ self-reports. Overall, results of the study showed that subjects allocated more money to anonymous strangers “when God concepts were implicitly activated than when neural or no concepts were activated” (p. 803). Explanations behind the results claimed that prosocial behavior can be influenced by an increase in either positive or negative moods, or by an increase in feelings of empathy. An additional explanation is that a person’s imagined presence of a God, or supernatural watchers, contributes to increased prosocial behavior.

Research by social psychologist Gordon Allport (Uldall, 2013) indirectly supports these study results, as he asserted that individuals’ behavior is often influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. A central commonality in religion is that there is an ‘omnipresent and omniscient moralizing agent’, and their imagined presence can influence the behavior of religious people.

However, Darley and Batson’s research (1973) challenge Shariff and Norenzayan’s results. Their research observed subjects going between two buildings and passing a person in need to see if they would stop to lend a helping hand. Some subjects were planning to give a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and some were on their way to give a talk unrelated to helping behavior. The results showed that if subjects were in a hurry to arrive at their destination, they were more likely to pass the person in need without offering aid. Additionally, the topic of the talk the subject was about to give made no significant difference in the likelihood of offering assistance. While the researchers found that religious personality did not play a role in predicting whether an individual would render aid, if a subject did stop, it was a helping response related to religiosity. The study concluded that variables that are most likely to predict helping behavior is the content of one’s thinking and the amount of hurry they are in. The most unexpected and ironic result was that subjects about to give a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan would not stop to help a person in need if they had time constraints. That is, thinking about the Good Samaritan actually decreased helping behavior.

Both of these studies are just two of a myriad of research conducted on the relationship between prosocial behavior and religiosity. The contradiction between the results illustrates that while individuals described as religious are more likely to help than others, it is not a universal trait.

Prosocial behavior occurs when people act to benefit others rather than themselves. So basically, prosocial conduct is described as acting in a way that benefits others or society as a whole. Prosocial behavior may come in many aspects, like helping others in need, comforting, sharing personal resources, and cooperating with others to achieve some common goals. Feeling empathy and concern for others and behaving in a way to help others are the behaviors that can be describe under prosocial. The people who act prosocial have positive social consequences and contribute the physical or psychological well-being of others. It is also a voluntary and having the intension of being benefit to others. Also, researchers found that people who act prosocial tend to be happier, healthier, and to live long. Those who are not acting prosocial tend to suffer the psychological cost that comes with guilt.

There are several theories and models that help to understand more clearly about prosocial behavior. Among them, negative state relief model and kin selection theory are easier to understand why we help people and who are the people we tend to help in different situations.

The negative state relief model was introduced by Schaller and Cialdini in 1988. They claimed that pro-social conduct stems from egoism rather than altruism, and that people help others to reduce stress when confronted with a difficult circumstance. This approach also explains why individuals get dissatisfied and leave. Also, walking away will helps to relieve tension. Humans have a natural desire to improve their moods. They can be lowered by engaging in any mood-enhancing action, such as assisting, when it is accompanied with positive value such as smiles and appreciations. Therefore, this model seeks to explain how one situational factor sadness relates to wanting to aid others. This idea claims that, at least in certain circumstances, a momentary sensation of melancholy will lead to a greater motivation to help others. A person who is upset because a close friend has just canceled a scheduled visit is more likely to assist a stranger in pushing his or her automobile out of a snowdrift. Why would being in a bad mood make you more inclined to help others? This is for selfish reasons, according to this view. People have been socialized in such a way that they have been rewarded for assisting others. People absorb this over time and find it satisfying to serve others. When a person is depressed, he or she feels compelled to improve his or her mood, and believes that assisting another person would do so. Simply said, when individuals are unhappy, they may be more willing to help others in the hopes of making themselves feel better. No matter what is an individual’s condition at the point of helping others, they help them selflessly.

Kin selection is a kind of natural selection in which individuals would put their own lives on the line in order to save closely related creatures, therefore ensuring the survival of genes they both carry. Kin selection is an evolutionary hypothesis that states that helping blood relations increases the probability of gene transmission to future generations. According to the hypothesis, compassion toward close relatives arises to protect the survival of shared genes. The closer two people are connected, the more likely they are to assist. For example, when considering genetically identical twins and fraternal twins, identical twins will have same characteristics and genes. And they tend to help each other very often and whenever they need each other. But fraternal twins, who share different types of genes, have different type of characteristics, and they tend to help each other less that an identical twin. Researchers explain that this scenario happens because of the same genetics that identical twins share and fraternal twins do not share the same. We are helpful in ways that enhance the likelihood of our DNA being handed down to future generations, according to evolutionary psychology. We are more inclined to aid those who share our DNA in both life-or-death and daily situations. Also, kin selection theory explains why an individual will help a non-related person. This happens because of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism explains the high cost of nonrelative cooperation. Reciprocal altruism is defined as altruism that happens between unrelated persons when the altruistic act will be repaid (or at least promised to be repaid) in the future. If helping someone now enhances your odds of being helped later, then you have a better chance of surviving. When we act in a way to help another in this theory no matter who we help we tend to help them selflessly.

Bothe these theories explains how an individual will act prosocial in different situation, and at that situation we think only about the others well-being and not about ourselves. Therefore, this whole explanation is about how prosocial behavior refers to a broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself.