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Helping behavior

Helping behavior encompasses voluntary actions aimed at providing aid or benefit to another individual in need, thereby alleviating distress or facilitating goal attainment, regardless of the helper's explicit motivation.^[1] Such behaviors constitute a core component of prosocial conduct, observed across human societies and nonhuman species, and are distinguished from obligatory or coerced assistance by their intentional and non-enforced nature.^[2] From an evolutionary perspective, helping likely originated through mechanisms promoting inclusive fitness, including kin selection, where aid is preferentially directed toward genetic relatives to propagate shared genes, and reciprocal altruism, wherein individuals assist non-kin in anticipation of future mutual benefits, fostering cooperative networks essential for survival in social groups.^[3] Empirical evidence from behavioral ecology supports these adaptive foundations, with studies in primates and rodents demonstrating context-dependent helping that aligns with fitness maximization rather than indiscriminate self-sacrifice.^[4] In humans, proximate drivers include empathy-induced arousal, which motivates intervention to reduce observed suffering, as tested in experimental paradigms contrasting altruistic versus egoistic hypotheses.^[5] Social psychological research highlights situational modulators, such as the bystander effect, where the presence of others diffuses responsibility and reduces the likelihood of intervention, as evidenced by seminal field experiments showing lower helping rates in crowds compared to solitary encounters.^[6] Personal factors like mood, perceived similarity to the recipient, and low cost of helping also predict engagement, with meta-analyses confirming robust effects across diverse cultural samples. Debates persist on the existence of pure altruism—uncontaminated by self-interest—with experimental manipulations of empathy suggesting some genuinely other-oriented motivations, though critics argue ultimate egoism via indirect rewards (e.g., reputation gains) underlies most instances, aligning with causal explanations from evolutionary biology.^[7]^[8] These insights underscore helping's dual proximate-ultimate causation, informing interventions to enhance cooperation in modern contexts like disaster response or community volunteering.^[9]

Definition and Historical Context

Core Definition and Distinctions

Helping behavior refers to voluntary actions by which one individual provides aid, support, or benefit to another person or group, typically in response to a perceived need or distress, without the recipient's prior request or expectation of immediate reciprocity.^[10] This encompasses a range of acts, from minor interventions like offering directions to more substantial efforts such as donating resources or intervening in emergencies, and is studied primarily within social psychology as a subset of prosocial behavior.^[11] Unlike obligatory compliance or enforced cooperation, helping behavior is characterized by the helper's discretion and initiative, often occurring in dyadic or small-group contexts where one party identifies another's need and acts to alleviate it.^[12] Key distinctions differentiate helping behavior from broader prosocial actions, which include sharing resources, cooperating in mutual tasks, or conforming to social norms for group harmony, even absent acute need.^[7] Helping specifically targets assistance to resolve a deficit or distress, such as relieving physical discomfort or emotional upset, rather than promoting general well-being or reciprocity.^[13] Motivational distinctions further divide helping into egoistic forms, where the ultimate goal is self-benefit like reducing personal arousal or guilt, and altruistic forms, where the primary aim is to enhance the recipient's welfare independent of self-gain.^[14] Empirical tests, such as those manipulating escape options from a victim's distress, have been used to probe these motives, with egoistic models predicting helping only when self-relief is accessible, while altruistic models hold across conditions.^[15] Helping behavior also contrasts with selfish or antisocial actions by prioritizing external benefit, though debates persist on whether purely selfless variants exist, given potential indirect gains like reputational enhancement or evolutionary fitness.^[16] Situational distinctions include spontaneous helping in low-stakes encounters versus planned or habitual aid in ongoing relationships, with the former more susceptible to immediate cues like bystander presence.^[4] These boundaries highlight helping's context-dependence, rooted in empirical observations rather than assumed universality.

Historical Development and Key Milestones

The concept of helping behavior emerged in philosophical discourse during the 19th century, with French philosopher Auguste Comte introducing the term "altruism" (altruisme) as a counter to egoism, denoting actions oriented toward the well-being of others independent of self-interest.^[17] This notion gained evolutionary grounding in Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), where he posited sympathy as an innate social instinct that promotes group cohesion and survival, evolving from animal behaviors observed in species like ants and primates.^[18] Darwin argued that such instincts, including aid to kin or non-kin, could be selected for if they enhanced reproductive fitness, laying foundational ideas for later biological explanations of prosocial actions.^[19] Early 20th-century psychology incorporated helping into discussions of social instincts, as in William McDougall's 1908 An Introduction to Social Psychology, which described sympathy and parental instincts as drivers of cooperative behavior essential for societal function.^[20] Systematic empirical study accelerated in the mid-20th century, spurred by real-world events like the March 13, 1964, murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, where numerous witnesses reportedly failed to intervene, prompting investigations into barriers to helping.^[21] Key milestones in psychological research followed: Bibb Latané and John M. Darley's 1968 experiments demonstrated the "bystander effect," showing that individuals are less likely to help in groups due to diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance, based on controlled simulations of emergencies.^[22] In 1969, Irving M. Piliavin, Judith Rodin, and Jane Allyn Piliavin's New York subway field study revealed that bystander intervention rates were higher for intoxicated-appearing victims perceived as less stigmatized, influencing the development of cost-reward models of helping.^[23] These works marked a shift toward experimental paradigms quantifying situational and perceptual factors in prosocial responses. The 1970s and 1980s saw theoretical maturation, with the term "prosocial behavior" gaining traction as an umbrella for helping, sharing, and comforting, often studied as an antonym to antisocial conduct.^[20] C. Daniel Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis, first experimentally tested in 1981, proposed that empathic concern—perspective-taking leading to feelings of sympathy—motivates genuine altruism aimed at others' welfare, distinct from egoistic relief of personal distress, challenging prevailing self-interest assumptions through manipulations of escape options and easy versus hard helping tasks.^[24] This period's research, drawing on both laboratory and field methods, established helping behavior as a core domain in social psychology, emphasizing interactions between individual dispositions, situational cues, and motivational states.

Evolutionary and Biological Foundations

Kin Selection Theory

Kin selection theory posits that individuals are more likely to engage in altruistic behaviors, such as helping, toward genetic relatives because such actions enhance the propagation of shared genes through inclusive fitness.^[25] This framework, formalized by W. D. Hamilton in his 1964 papers "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour," integrates classical Darwinian fitness with effects on relatives' reproduction.^[26] Hamilton's rule, rB > C, quantifies this: altruism evolves when the genetic relatedness r between actor and recipient, multiplied by the fitness benefit B to the recipient, exceeds the fitness cost C to the actor.^[25] In the context of helping behavior, kin selection predicts preferential aid to closer kin, such as parents investing in offspring or siblings assisting each other, over non-relatives, as this maximizes inclusive fitness rather than direct personal reproduction.^[27] Empirical support includes observations of greater resource allocation and risk-taking toward kin in both animals and humans; for instance, humans donate more to family members than strangers in experimental scenarios, scaling with degree of kinship.^[27] A 2022 study provided experimental evidence in financial decision-making, showing participants sacrificed more for kin in proportion to relatedness, aligning with Hamilton's rule.^[28] Humans detect kin through mechanisms like phenotype matching and familiarity cues, facilitating targeted helping; studies on siblings demonstrate perceptual biases favoring close relatives.^[29] This theory underpins evolutionary explanations for nepotism in parental care, alloparenting, and inheritance patterns, where aid correlates with genetic overlap.^[30] While foundational, kin selection faces criticisms, including claims of overly restrictive assumptions and challenges from multilevel selection advocates, though defenders argue it robustly predicts social behaviors without invoking group-level processes.^[31] Ongoing debates highlight its compatibility with broader evolutionary models, but evidence from diverse taxa, including microbes and primates, affirms its role in altruism's origins.^[32]

Reciprocal Altruism

Reciprocal altruism refers to a form of cooperation in which an individual incurs a short-term cost to provide a benefit to an unrelated other, with the expectation of receiving a similar benefit in return at a later time, thereby enhancing the net fitness of both parties over repeated interactions.^[33] This concept was formalized by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in his 1971 paper "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," which argued that such behavior could evolve through natural selection despite apparent reductions in immediate fitness, provided certain preconditions are met.^[34] Trivers posited that reciprocal altruism extends beyond kin selection by enabling cooperation among non-relatives, addressing the evolutionary puzzle of why organisms help strangers or acquaintances at personal expense.^[35] For reciprocal altruism to evolve, populations must exhibit longevity relative to the interval between aid exchanges, limited dispersal to allow repeated encounters, individual recognition capabilities, and mechanisms to detect and punish cheaters who accept help without reciprocating.^[34] Trivers emphasized that the potential benefit of reciprocated aid must exceed the initial cost, with strategies like "tit-for-tat"—cooperating initially but mirroring the partner's prior action—stabilizing cooperation in game-theoretic models such as the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.^[33] These conditions mitigate the free-rider problem, where non-reciprocators exploit altruists, potentially leading to the collapse of cooperative systems; evolutionary pressures thus favor cognitive adaptations for tracking reciprocity, including emotions like gratitude to reinforce bonds and moralistic aggression toward defectors.^[36] Empirical support from animal studies includes vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), which regurgitate blood meals to roost-mates unable to feed, preferentially aiding those who have previously reciprocated, with data from field observations showing higher sharing rates among frequent interactors and reduced tolerance for non-reciprocators.^[37] Similarly, cleaner fish like the bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) remove parasites from client fish, sometimes forgoing preferred foods to avoid client rejection, with long-term partnerships demonstrating conditional cooperation.^[34] In primates, grooming exchanges among unrelated individuals often follow a reciprocal pattern, though debates persist on whether this reflects true calculated altruism or emergent mutualism from proximate needs.^[38] In humans, reciprocal altruism underpins much of prosocial helping behavior toward non-kin, manifesting in cultural norms of exchange, reputation-building, and indirect reciprocity where aid to third parties enhances one's standing for future benefits.^[39] Experimental evidence from economic games shows participants cooperating with expectations of return, with neural imaging revealing activation in reward centers during anticipated reciprocity.^[40] However, human systems extend beyond direct dyadic exchanges via group-level mechanisms like gossip and punishment, amplifying cooperation scales beyond what strict pairwise reciprocity could sustain alone.^[41] While foundational, the theory's application to spontaneous helping requires integration with psychological proximate causes, as pure reciprocity may not fully explain one-shot aid without reputational incentives.^[42]

Biological Mechanisms and Sex Differences

Helping behavior involves neural circuits associated with empathy and reward processing, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula (AI), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ), as identified in fMRI studies of altruistic decision-making and responses to others' pain.^[43]^[44] Activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex specifically predicts choices to forgo personal gain for others' benefit in economic games.^[45] These regions integrate affective empathy—triggered by cues of suffering—with cognitive evaluation, motivating costly aid.^[46] The neuropeptide oxytocin plays a central role in facilitating prosocial responses by enhancing empathy and trust, particularly in contexts of observed distress, through modulation of amygdala and insula activity.^[47] Intranasal oxytocin administration increases donations to others over self or environmental causes in some paradigms, though effects are context-dependent and can shift toward ingroup favoritism.^[48] Conversely, testosterone administration often reduces altruism and trust in experimental settings, such as ultimatum games, by prioritizing self-interest, while baseline levels correlate with parochial altruism—favoring ingroup members at outgroup expense—in males during intergroup conflict simulations.^[49]^[50] Interactions between oxytocin and testosterone reactivity further modulate these behaviors, with oxytocin sometimes counteracting testosterone's antisocial effects in maternal contexts.^[51] Sex differences in helping arise from evolutionary pressures under parental investment theory, where females' greater obligatory gametic and gestational costs lead to higher selectivity in aid allocation, favoring kin and long-term relational support over risky, status-signaling interventions.^[52] Meta-analyses of cooperation studies confirm men exhibit greater helping in public, short-term, and dangerous scenarios (e.g., emergencies involving strangers), while women predominate in private, ongoing care like child-rearing or emotional support, aligning with ancestral divisions in mating effort versus parenting trade-offs.^[53]^[54] Hormonally, oxytocin exerts stronger prosocial effects on social cognition in males than females, potentially amplifying men's context-specific altruism, whereas women's baseline oxytocin levels are higher but less responsive to exogenous boosts in affiliative tasks.^[55]^[56] Testosterone's role in males supports competitive or parochial helping, interacting with oxytocin differently by sex to influence ingroup defense over universal aid.^[57] These patterns hold across species, as seen in phylogenetic analyses of birds where future reproduction prospects amplify sex-specific helping effort.^[58]

Psychological Models of Motivation

Egoistic Explanations

Egoistic explanations posit that helping behavior arises from self-interested motivations aimed at enhancing the helper's own welfare, such as reducing personal distress or securing anticipated rewards, rather than concern for others' well-being independent of self-benefit.^[59] These perspectives align with psychological egoism, which contends that all human actions, including apparent altruism, ultimately serve to satisfy the actor's desires or avoid discomfort.^[60] The negative-state relief model, developed by Robert Cialdini and colleagues, argues that observing someone in need evokes negative emotions like sadness or guilt in the bystander, prompting helping as a means to restore a positive mood state.^[61] Experimental evidence supports this, as individuals in induced negative moods exhibit increased helping when they perceive the act as mood-alleviating, but less so when alternative relief options, such as escapism, are available.^[62] For instance, in studies from the 1970s and 1980s, participants who viewed a distressed confederate helped more if their own prior negative mood was salient, suggesting self-relief as the driver.^[61] The arousal-cost-reward model, proposed by Jane Piliavin and colleagues in 1969 and refined in 1981, describes how perceiving an emergency generates empathic arousal, which the bystander seeks to dissipate through helping if the perceived costs (e.g., time, risk) are outweighed by rewards (e.g., emotional relief, social praise).^[63] In the seminal 1969 New York subway field experiment, bystanders intervened in 62% of cases involving an intoxicated-appearing victim (low responsibility, high helping) versus 11% for a cane-holding victim perceived as responsible, illustrating how cost-reward calculations influence action.^[64] This model emphasizes that non-helping incurs costs like ongoing arousal, making intervention a rational egoistic choice when net benefits favor it.^[63] Social exchange theory extends egoistic reasoning by viewing helping as a calculated exchange where individuals weigh potential gains, such as reciprocity, approval, or status, against expenditures of effort or resources.^[65] Research from 1976 demonstrated that female undergraduates provided more instigative help when resources like information or effort promised social rewards, consistent with exchange principles over pure altruism.^[65] Even empathy, in the egoism hypothesis, motivates helping to achieve self-benefits like guilt reduction or "empathic joy," as critiqued in debates where escape from personal distress remains the ultimate goal.^[66] These models collectively challenge altruistic interpretations by attributing prosocial acts to hedonic or utilitarian self-gain, though empirical tests often reveal mixed support amid ongoing debates with empathy-altruism proponents.^[61]

Altruistic Explanations

Altruistic explanations of helping behavior emphasize motivations where the primary aim is to benefit the recipient's welfare, distinct from egoistic drives that prioritize the helper's own emotional relief or gain. These accounts challenge psychological egoism—the view that all actions are ultimately self-serving—by proposing that empathic concern can generate genuinely other-oriented goals. Central to this perspective is the empathy-altruism hypothesis, which asserts that feeling empathy for a person in need produces an altruistic motive to reduce that need, even when the helper can easily escape without helping.^[67]^[68] Proposed by C. Daniel Batson in the 1980s, the hypothesis distinguishes empathic concern—an other-focused emotion like sympathy or compassion—from personal distress, which is self-focused anxiety. Experiments supporting this include paradigms where participants witness a victim (e.g., a confederate feigning injury or distress) and can choose to help or escape. When escape is easy and low-cost alternatives to helping exist (ruling out guilt aversion or self-reward), high-empathy individuals still help at rates significantly above low-empathy controls, suggesting the motive is not egoistic relief but vicarious welfare enhancement. For instance, in Batson et al.'s 1981 study, subjects exposed to a woman's electric shock footage under empathic induction helped more (40% vs. 10% in low-empathy groups) despite an easy out.^[24]^[69] Similar patterns hold across replications, with meta-analyses indicating empathic concern predicts helping directed at the victim's need, not just any mood repair.^[70] Evidence extends to real-world analogs, such as increased donations or aid when empathy is primed via perspective-taking instructions, which elevate other-oriented concern over self-focused responses. Neuroimaging supports this by linking empathic concern to brain regions like the anterior insula and anterior cingulate, associated with vicarious pain and reward from others' relief, rather than purely self-referential areas. Batson (2011) reviewed over 30 experiments, concluding that altruistic motivation emerges reliably from empathy, though it coexists with egoistic alternatives in mixed-motive scenarios.^[71]^[72] Critics argue that apparent altruism may mask subtle egoistic elements, such as indirect self-benefits (e.g., reputational gains or reduced empathic over-arousal), and some failed replications question the paradigm's controls. However, Batson countered with refined designs manipulating anticipated guilt or sadness, where helping persists only under true empathy induction, not when alternatives fully block self-discomfort. While not claiming universal purity—acknowledging contextual egoism—the hypothesis demonstrates that altruism is empirically viable, particularly in low-observability or high-cost helping where self-interest is minimized. Ongoing debates highlight methodological challenges in isolating motives, but altruistic explanations remain supported for empathy-driven prosocial acts.^[73]^[74]

Integrated Models and Guilt-Based Theories

Guilt-based theories of helping behavior emphasize the role of anticipated or experienced guilt as a primary motivator for prosocial actions, framing helping as a response to self-focused moral discomfort rather than pure concern for others' welfare. In these accounts, guilt arises from perceived personal responsibility for a victim's plight or from failing to meet internalized ethical standards, prompting individuals to help in order to alleviate this aversive emotion. Empirical evidence from experimental manipulations, such as inducing guilt through reminders of past inaction, demonstrates increased helping rates, with participants reporting reduced guilt post-helping.^[75]^[76] This aligns with egoistic interpretations, where the ultimate goal is personal emotional relief, as supported by studies showing that alternative guilt-reduction methods, like self-forgiveness tasks, similarly decrease helping propensity.^[75] The negative state relief model (NSRM), developed by Cialdini et al. in foundational work from the 1970s onward, exemplifies a guilt-inclusive framework by positing that negative affective states—including guilt, sadness, or distress—drive helping as a hedonic strategy to restore mood. Under NSRM, exposure to need induces guilt particularly when the observer anticipates self-censure for non-intervention, leading to prosocial behavior that directly counters the emotional deficit; for instance, in lab paradigms, guilt-primed subjects donated more to charity or aided confederates compared to neutral controls.^[12]^[62] While NSRM integrates guilt with broader negative states, it has faced scrutiny from meta-analytic reviews questioning its universality, as some valid tests fail to replicate mood improvement solely through helping, suggesting contextual moderators like perceived efficacy influence outcomes.^[77] Integrated models extend guilt-based explanations by incorporating elements from both egoistic and altruistic paradigms, often positing guilt as a mediator between empathic arousal and action. For example, empathy may trigger guilt over inaction, blending Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis—where other-oriented concern motivates helping—with egoistic relief mechanisms, as guilt aversion in economic games shows individuals cooperating to avoid disappointing benefactors' expectations, evidenced by higher transfer rates in trust games when reciprocity beliefs are salient.^[75]^[78] These hybrid approaches account for findings that guilt promotes reparative prosociality in interpersonal contexts, such as apologies or aid in dyads, while acknowledging limitations; experimental designs allowing escape from the situation parallel non-helping in reducing aid, undermining claims of ultimate altruism by indicating self-relief as the proximal driver.^[79] Recent neuroeconomic models further integrate guilt with decision-making processes, linking anterior cingulate activation during guilt anticipation to altruistic choices in donation tasks.^[80] Despite academic preferences for altruistic narratives, rigorous tests favor models where guilt operates egoistically, as pure altruism lacks consistent differentiation from self-interest in controlled settings.^[14]

Empirical Evidence from Research

Classic Experimental Paradigms

One of the foundational paradigms in helping behavior research is the bystander intervention experiments conducted by John M. Darley and Bibb Latané in 1968, which demonstrated the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility. In their laboratory study, female undergraduate participants believed they were participating in a group discussion about college life via intercom with 1 to 5 other students (actually confederates or recordings). Midway through, one "participant" appeared to suffer an epileptic seizure, coughing and stuttering pleas for help. The probability of the subject reporting the emergency dropped from 85% when alone to 31% when believing five others were present, with response times increasing from 52 seconds alone to over 3 minutes in larger groups.^[81] A follow-up experiment replicated this using a smoke-filled room: alone, 75% of participants reported the smoke within 2 minutes, but with two passive confederates, only 38% did so promptly, attributing non-action to pluralistic ignorance where individuals look to others for cues on the situation's severity.^[81] Complementing lab paradigms, the 1969 field experiment by Irwin M. Piliavin, Judith Rodin, and Jane Allyn Piliavin examined bystander responses in naturalistic emergencies on the New York City subway. Over 103 trials, a confederate victim (white or black male) collapsed in the "critical area" of a subway car, either appearing ill (carrying a cane) or drunk (with liquor bottle). For the ill victim, 62 of 65 trials elicited help within 70 seconds, primarily from same-race bystanders, with rapid intervention (average 7 seconds). The drunk victim received help in only 19 of 38 trials, often delayed or indirect (e.g., comments rather than aid), and black victims overall received less assistance, though race effects diminished with model intervention where a trained bystander helped early, boosting overall helping to 80%. These findings underscored victim characteristics like perceived responsibility and physical cues influencing arousal and helping, challenging pure diffusion models by showing high baseline intervention rates in real settings. To probe motivational underpinnings, C. Daniel Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis was tested through a series of controlled experiments starting in the 1980s, contrasting egoistic (self-benefit) versus altruistic (other-oriented) drives. In one paradigm, participants listened to a broadcast about Elaine, a student facing academic jeopardy due to injury; empathy was induced via perspective-taking instructions or not. Subjects could help by taking Elaine's participation points (costly escape) or opt out easily. High-empathy participants helped even when escape was difficult and rewards absent, allocating 88% of points to Elaine versus 30% in low-empathy conditions, suggesting empathy evokes ultimate altruism rather than mere mood repair or punishment avoidance.^[24] Critics' egoistic counters, like negative state relief, were addressed in variants blocking self-reward (e.g., no mood improvement post-help), yet high-empathy aiding persisted, supporting the hypothesis across 20+ studies despite methodological debates on escape ease manipulation.^[67] Another influential situational paradigm is Darley and Batson's 1973 "Good Samaritan" study with seminary students tasked with recording a sermon on the biblical parable. Half were informed they were late for the next appointment, creating time pressure. En route, a confederate slumped "ill" in a doorway; only 10% of hurried participants offered aid (stopping to help), versus 63% of non-hurried ones, with many rushed subjects reframing the victim as a non-emergency (e.g., "drunk"). This highlighted how cognitive busyness overrides dispositional factors like religiosity in inhibiting helping, revealing situational costs to intervention. These paradigms collectively established empirical benchmarks for dissecting when and why individuals intervene, emphasizing group dynamics, victim traits, empathy, and situational demands over innate traits alone.

Field Studies and Observational Data

In a seminal field experiment conducted between 1968 and 1969 on New York City subway trains, Piliavin, Rodin, and Piliavin staged 103 emergencies in which a confederate collapsed, either portraying an ill victim carrying a cane or an intoxicated one with a liquor bottle. Observers recorded spontaneous helping behaviors from passengers, revealing intervention in 62% of trials overall, with rates reaching 81% when the victim appeared ill versus markedly lower (around 20-30%) for the intoxicated condition; factors such as the victim's race, the presence of a model intervener, and passenger demographics influenced response latency and likelihood.^[23] These findings highlighted the role of victim characteristics and low diffusion of responsibility in confined, high-stakes public settings, contrasting with lab-based bystander apathy predictions.^[64] Cross-cultural field studies have demonstrated substantial variation in spontaneous helping toward strangers. In experiments spanning 23 major cities worldwide from the 1990s to early 2000s, Levine, Norenzayan, and Philbrick staged nonemergency scenarios, including alerting a lost pedestrian, assisting with dropped magazines, and aiding a simulated injury; overall helping rates ranged from 93% in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to 40% in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with cities characterized by slower paces of life exhibiting higher prosocial responses independent of economic development or collectivism levels.^[82] Such data underscore contextual influences like urban tempo on real-world altruism, with individualistic cultures not consistently outperforming collectivist ones.^[83] The lost letter technique provides unobtrusive observational insights into community-level helping by tracking the return rates of deliberately "lost" stamped envelopes addressed to various recipients. Pioneered by Milgram in the 1960s to gauge civic altruism, subsequent applications, such as a 2012 study in London involving over 17,000 dropped letters, found return rates averaging 63%, with affluent neighborhoods showing up to 87% recovery—suggesting socioeconomic status positively correlates with anonymous prosocial acts, potentially due to greater resources or norms of reciprocity.^[84]^[85] Similar patterns emerged in field applications across China and other regions, where letters implying charitable or pro-social causes elicited higher returns than neutral or antagonistic ones.^[86] Observational analyses of natural disasters reveal robust spontaneous helping despite chaos, challenging assumptions of widespread panic or self-preservation. Archival and eyewitness data from events like hurricanes and earthquakes indicate "convergence behavior," where unaffected individuals flock to aid victims, fostering emergent cooperation and resource sharing; for instance, post-disaster surveys and behavioral logs document elevated altruism, with social ties strengthening through mutual assistance rather than breakdown.^[87] These patterns hold across cultures, attributed to heightened empathy and group solidarity under threat, though sustained helping often wanes without institutional support.

Recent Findings (2020 Onward)

A 2023 analysis of global survey data indicated a substantial rise in altruistic behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, including increased donations, volunteering, and helping strangers, which correlated with elevated well-being among altruists, beneficiaries, and even observers of such acts.^[88] This surge contrasted with baseline trends, suggesting situational pressures like collective threat amplified prosocial tendencies beyond typical levels.^[89] Experimental evidence from 2023 demonstrated that performing altruistic acts directly boosts the helper's subjective happiness, with positive emotions serving as a key mediator, independent of reciprocity expectations.^[8] Similarly, a 2024 meta-analysis confirmed a robust positive association between perceived social support and prosocial behaviors, attributing this to enhanced interpersonal affiliations that motivate helping.^[90] In digital contexts, a 2025 scoping review cataloged diverse online prosocial actions—such as virtual volunteering, emotional support provision, and crowdfunding participation—noting definitional inconsistencies but consistent engagement patterns driven by platform affordances.^[91] Among adolescents, self-other overlap emerged as a predictor of online altruism in a 2025 study, mediated by empathy and moral identity, highlighting cognitive fusion with others as a facilitator of virtual helping.^[92] Intervention studies yielded positive outcomes: a 2025 school program targeting children increased altruistic actions, prosocial compliance, and overall well-being relative to pre-intervention baselines.^[93] Longitudinal quasi-experiments also showed prosocial nudges inducing behavioral spillovers in young adults, sustaining elevated helping rates over time.^[94] In crisis scenarios, 2024 research linked mortality salience to heightened helping intentions, particularly when cues emphasized shared vulnerability.^[95] Developmental findings included documentation of prosocial helping in U.S. infants aged 11-20 months from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, with behaviors like object retrieval occurring reliably across tasks despite variability in frequency.^[96] These results underscore early-emerging capacities for targeted aid, aligning with prior paradigms but extending to broader samples post-2020.

Factors Influencing Helping Behavior

Individual-Level Factors

Individual-level factors influencing helping behavior include stable personality traits, empathic tendencies, demographic characteristics such as age and sex, and transient emotional states like mood.^[97] These factors operate through cognitive, affective, and motivational processes, with empirical evidence from meta-analyses and longitudinal studies indicating their predictive power independent of situational cues.^[98] Personality traits, particularly from the Big Five model, show consistent associations with prosocial actions. Agreeableness, characterized by compassion and cooperation, strongly predicts helping behavior across contexts, with meta-analytic evidence linking higher agreeableness to increased donation and volunteering rates.^[12] Conscientiousness also correlates positively, as dutiful individuals are more likely to engage in sustained aid, though effects are moderated by prosocial knowledge acquisition.^[99] Narrower traits like the prosocial personality battery—encompassing other-oriented empathy and helpfulness—account for unique variance in altruism beyond broad factors, resolving bandwidth-fidelity trade-offs in prediction.^[98] Twin studies further suggest heritability in these traits contributes to stable individual differences in prosociality.^[100] Empathy, both cognitive (perspective-taking) and affective (emotional sharing), emerges as a core driver, with meta-analyses confirming a moderate positive correlation (r ≈ 0.20-0.30) to prosocial behavior across ages and cultures.^[101] Higher empathy levels predict greater attention to others' needs and reduced personal distress barriers to action, though effects vary by empathy type—empathic concern yields stronger links to costly helping than personal distress.^[102] Genetic factors influence this link, with heritability estimates around 30% for empathy-prosocial associations, underscoring dispositional roots over purely learned responses.^[100] Demographic factors reveal patterns in helping propensity. Sex differences show men engaging in more heroic or risky aid (e.g., emergencies), per a meta-analysis of 172 studies finding overall male advantage (d ≈ 0.34), though women excel in nurturant, low-risk contexts like emotional support.^[103] Age trajectories indicate rising prosociality from childhood to midlife, with meta-analytic data from adult lifespan studies showing peak helping in mid-adulthood (ages 40-60), potentially due to accumulated resources and perspective, before slight declines in later years.^[104] These patterns hold after controlling for cultural variance, though methodological factors like self-report bias can inflate estimates.^[105] Mood states exert acute influences, with positive affect reliably boosting helping via broadened cognitive processing and reduced self-focus. Experimental inductions, such as recall tasks, demonstrate that happy moods increase donation amounts by 20-50% in lab settings, consistent across decades of research.^[106] Negative moods yield mixed results—guilt or sadness can motivate aid to restore equilibrium, but high-intensity negatives like anger suppress it—highlighting mood's valence and intensity as moderators.^[107] Daily diary studies link frequent helping to subsequent mood elevation, suggesting bidirectional causality where prosocial acts reinforce positive states.^[108]

Situational and Contextual Factors

The bystander effect, first demonstrated in laboratory experiments by Latané and Darley in 1968, shows that the presence of other potential helpers reduces the likelihood of any individual intervening in an emergency due to diffusion of responsibility, where each person assumes others will act.^[81] In their studies, participants exposed to simulated seizures via intercom reported the incident more slowly or less frequently when they believed multiple others were also listening, with helping rates dropping as group size increased from one to five.^[81] A meta-analysis by Fischer et al. (2011) confirmed this effect across 50 years of research, analyzing over 100 studies, but identified a boundary condition: the effect weakens or reverses in high-danger situations where bystanders perceive personal risk, as diffusion of responsibility diminishes when intervention costs escalate for all.^[109] Perceived cost and risk of helping also critically shape responses, with higher costs—such as physical danger, time investment, or resource expenditure—consistently lowering intervention rates. In experiments manipulating cost levels, such as requiring effort to assist a confederate, participants helped less when intervention demanded greater personal sacrifice, as measured by response latency and completion rates.^[110] This aligns with empirical findings from field and lab settings where low-cost opportunities, like donating small change, elicit higher prosocial acts compared to high-cost scenarios involving direct confrontation or aid in hazardous conditions.^[110] Recent replications emphasize that costs interact with situational danger; for instance, bystanders weigh potential harm to themselves more heavily in ambiguous or non-emergent contexts, further suppressing action unless benefits outweigh risks.^[109] Situational ambiguity, or uncertainty about whether help is truly needed, inhibits helping by delaying the interpretation of cues as an emergency. Latané and Darley (1970) outlined a decision model where bystanders first notice, interpret, and assume responsibility only if the situation is unambiguous; experiments showed that vague signals, like ambiguous smoke or sounds, reduced reporting rates compared to clear emergencies.^[81] Supporting evidence from Clark and Word (1972) indicated that bystander presence amplifies this effect specifically under ambiguity, as individuals look to others for interpretive cues, leading to pluralistic ignorance where inaction signals normalcy.^[111] Time pressure exacerbates these dynamics, with meta-analyses revealing it often curbs prosocial choices by prioritizing self-preservation over deliberation, though effects vary by context—reducing generosity in low-urgency scenarios but potentially heightening aid in immediate threats.^[112]^[113]

Cultural and Environmental Influences

Cross-cultural studies reveal substantial variations in rates of helping strangers, with empirical observations indicating higher spontaneous aid in some societies than others. For instance, a 2001 field experiment across 23 large cities found helping rates for dropped items ranging from 93% in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to 40% in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, suggesting place-specific cultural norms influence bystander intervention.^[82] These differences correlate with societal tightness-looseness, where tighter cultures (e.g., in Asia) enforce stronger norms but may show lower aid to out-groups compared to looser, Latin American contexts. Cultural orientations toward individualism versus collectivism further modulate helping, though findings challenge assumptions of uniform collectivist superiority in prosociality. Collectivist societies emphasize in-group altruism, fostering reciprocity within kin or community networks, yet individualistic cultures often exhibit higher overall rates of anonymous helping to strangers, as evidenced by cross-national data linking individualism to elevated charitable donations and volunteerism per capita.^[114] A 2023 study across individualistic (U.S.) and collectivistic (China) samples confirmed that altruistic acts boost the helper's happiness more in individualists, where self-benefit aligns with cultural self-reliance, whereas collectivists derive less personal gain from "pure" altruism focused on recipients.^[115] Horizontal collectivism—prioritizing equality within groups—predicts stronger preferences for charitable giving than vertical individualism, which stresses personal achievement over communal aid.^[116] Environmental contexts, particularly urban density and natural settings, causally affect helping through overload and restoration mechanisms. A meta-analysis of 65 field tests from 1970s–1980s data concluded that rural residents provide aid more frequently than urban dwellers, with effect sizes indicating 10–20% higher helping rates in low-density areas due to reduced social overload and higher perceived responsibility.^[117] Urban environments, characterized by high stimulation and anonymity, diminish prosocial responses, as replicated in controlled drops of items where city pedestrians intervened 15–25% less than rural counterparts.^[118] Exposure to natural settings counters this: experimental manipulations show that brief nature walks increase prosocial donations by 20–30% compared to urban walks, mediated by restored attention and lowered ego depletion.^[119] These effects hold across demographics, underscoring physical environment's role in priming empathy over self-preservation.

Debates and Criticisms

Altruism Versus Ultimate Egoism

The debate between altruism and ultimate egoism in helping behavior centers on whether prosocial actions are ultimately motivated by a genuine concern for others' welfare, independent of self-benefit, or if all such behaviors serve the actor's self-interest at their core. Psychological egoism posits that every voluntary action, including helping, is driven by the pursuit of personal gain, such as pleasure, relief from discomfort, or avoidance of guilt, rendering true altruism impossible.^[60] In contrast, altruism theory argues that individuals can experience motivations where the ultimate goal is to increase another's well-being for its own sake, without reducible self-serving aims.^[5] This distinction is tested in experimental paradigms distinguishing proximate motives (immediate triggers like empathy) from ultimate goals (whether reducing one's own distress or the victim's need).^[120] A prominent framework supporting altruism is C. Daniel Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis, which claims that perspective-taking induces empathic concern—an other-oriented emotional response—that generates altruistic motivation to relieve the observed person's suffering, rather than egoistic drives like escaping personal arousal.^[24] Batson and colleagues provided evidence through studies where participants empathized with a confederate in apparent distress (e.g., Elaine in a laboratory shock experiment); when given an easy escape from further exposure but no alternative relief for the victim, high-empathy participants were more likely to volunteer to take the victim's place, suggesting the goal was the victim's relief, not self-comfort.^[69] Over multiple replications, including variations blocking egoistic escapes (e.g., no mood-enhancing distractions), Batson reported consistent support, with empathic concern predicting helping even when self-benefit was minimized.^[70] These findings challenge strict egoism by isolating motivation via operational definitions: altruistic if helping persists when only the victim's need is escapable, egoistic otherwise.^[121] Critics, however, argue that Batson's paradigms fail to conclusively rule out ultimate egoism, as alternative self-interested explanations persist. Robert Cialdini and associates proposed the aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis, contending that empathic concern is egoistically motivated by the need to alleviate one's own uncomfortable arousal from witnessing suffering, akin to negative state relief model predictions.^[122] In critiques of Batson's 1981 study, they noted methodological confounds, such as incomplete blocking of mood repair options, and replicated experiments showing helping drops when arousal reduction is fully escapable without aiding the victim, implying self-relief as the ultimate goal.^[69] Further, skeptics highlight that even apparent altruistic choices may stem from subtle self-rewards, like intrinsic satisfaction or social approval, which psychological egoism subsumes as self-benefiting; Batson's evidence, while suggestive under controlled conditions, does not generalize to real-world helping where multiple motives intermingle.^[71] Empirical reviews indicate no consensus, with evidence for both pure egoistic and pluralistic motives in prosocial behavior. Developmental studies show children as young as 18 months engage in spontaneous helping without external rewards, hinting at innate altruistic tendencies, yet adult behaviors often correlate with egoistic factors like anticipated reciprocity.^[5] Philosophically informed analyses, such as those by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, advocate methodological pluralism, recognizing that while egoism explains much strategic helping, altruism better accounts for costly, non-reciprocal acts without viable self-interest reductions.^[5] The debate persists due to the challenge of introspective access to ultimate motives and the unfalsifiability of egoism's claim that all "altruistic" feelings are disguised self-interest, though experimental dissociations provide provisional support for altruism's existence in specific empathy-driven contexts.^[123]

Validity of Evolutionary Approaches

Evolutionary approaches explain helping behavior as adaptations that enhanced ancestral fitness, primarily through kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Kin selection, formalized by Hamilton's rule (rB > C, where r is genetic relatedness, B the benefit to the recipient, and C the cost to the actor), predicts greater helping toward closer relatives to propagate shared genes. Empirical tests in humans confirm this: anticipated social support during crises correlates with relatedness, as individuals expect more aid from kin sharing higher proportions of genes.^[124] In experimental economic games, decisions align with Hamilton's rule, with participants sacrificing resources for kin in proportion to r when benefits outweigh costs.^[125] Quantitative analyses across populations further validate the rule's prediction of altruism's evolution when inclusive fitness gains exceed direct costs.^[126] Reciprocal altruism posits helping non-kin in expectation of future returns, stabilized by mechanisms like reputation and punishment in repeated interactions. Evidence includes psychological capacities for tracking reciprocity and enforcing norms, as seen in costly punishment experiments where third-party interventions promote cooperation.^[127] However, reviews of evolutionary models reveal that even purported alternatives to kin selection, such as spatial or network reciprocity, implicitly rely on positive genetic relatedness due to local mating and dispersal patterns, underscoring kin selection's foundational role.^[128] In humans, gene-culture coevolution extends these: cultural norms favoring prosociality, reinforced by group-level selection, amplify genetic predispositions for altruism beyond kin, as evidenced by higher cooperation in one-shot games under punishment cues.^[127] Critics argue evolutionary explanations risk post-hoc "just-so stories" lacking falsifiability, particularly for complex human behaviors like large-scale helping, and mainstream psychology often prioritizes proximate mechanisms over ultimate causes.^[129] Assumptions of genetic group selection, needed for non-reciprocal altruism, demand low migration and high intergroup competition, conditions debated in anthropological data from hunter-gatherers.^[127] Yet, converging evidence from comparative biology, neuroimaging of empathy-reward links, and cross-cultural studies counters dismissal, demonstrating testable predictions like kin-biased resource allocation that hold across contexts.^[129] While not exhaustive—cultural learning and reasoning enable altruism in novel environments—evolutionary frameworks provide causal realism for helping's origins, supported by inclusive fitness dynamics rather than refuted by ideological resistance.^[127]^[129]

Overemphasis on Empathy and Its Limits

Critics of dominant psychological models argue that empathy receives disproportionate emphasis as the primary driver of helping behavior, potentially overshadowing alternative mechanisms such as social norms, rational calculation, or habitual rule-following. The empathy-altruism hypothesis, advanced by C. Daniel Batson, posits that empathic concern—defined as an other-oriented emotional response—produces genuinely altruistic motivation distinct from egoistic self-interest, supported by experiments where participants persist in helping even when escape is easy. However, this framework has faced scrutiny for methodological limitations, including reliance on self-reported motivations that may not distinguish true altruism from subtle egoistic rewards, and failure to account for cases where empathy fails to predict or even inhibits prosocial action.^[122] Empirical reviews indicate inconsistent links between affective empathy and helping across contexts, with some meta-analyses finding negligible or context-dependent effects.^[130] A core limitation of empathy lies in its inherent biases, which restrict its utility for impartial or scalable helping. Empathy tends to favor proximate, similar, or vividly depicted individuals—known as the "identifiable victim effect"—leading to disproportionate aid for single, relatable cases over statistical aggregates of suffering, as demonstrated in donation experiments where appeals featuring a named child's photo elicited more contributions than equivalent factual descriptions of group needs.^[131] Psychologist Paul Bloom contends that this parochial quality renders empathy a poor guide for policy or large-scale altruism, citing evidence that it amplifies in-group favoritism and neglects distant or abstract crises, such as global poverty versus local charities.^[132] Furthermore, empathic over-arousal can trigger personal distress, an aversive self-focused reaction that motivates avoidance rather than aid, particularly under high cognitive load or repeated exposure, as shown in studies where induced distress reduced prosocial responses in resource-scarce scenarios.^[133]^[134] Overreliance on empathy also contributes to practical drawbacks like compassion fatigue and diminished long-term effectiveness in helping roles. Frontline workers in caregiving professions exhibit burnout rates exceeding 40% in some surveys, correlated with chronic empathic engagement that depletes emotional resources without sustaining behavioral commitment.^[135] This "risky strength" dynamic—where initial empathic tendencies predict early prosociality but erode under strain—highlights how empathy's motivational power wanes without supportive structures, as multilevel analyses of organizational behavior reveal inverse effects on sustained helping in high-empathy environments.^[134] In contrast, rational compassion—deliberative concern detached from visceral feeling—facilitates broader, evidence-based interventions, as Bloom illustrates with historical examples like effective philanthropists who prioritized data over emotional pull, yielding greater aggregate benefits.^[136] Such critiques underscore the need for balanced models incorporating non-empathic drivers to explain robust helping behaviors observed in low-empathy individuals or rule-governed systems.

Real-World Implications and Applications

Applications in Emergencies and Bystander Intervention

In emergency situations, helping behavior is frequently impeded by the bystander effect, a phenomenon where the presence of other potential helpers reduces the likelihood of individual intervention due to diffusion of responsibility and social influence. Classic experimental paradigms, such as those simulating smoke-filled rooms or apparent seizures, have empirically demonstrated that bystanders are less responsive to emergencies when others are present, with meta-analytic reviews confirming this inhibitory effect across diverse scenarios.^[137] However, perceived victim vulnerability and emergency severity can counteract this, as evidenced by studies showing increased bystander actions, such as initiating CPR, when the risk of death appears imminent.^[138] Bystander intervention training programs apply principles of helping behavior to mitigate these barriers, emphasizing skills like recognizing emergencies, assuming responsibility, and implementing safe actions. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of such programs report small-to-medium effect sizes in enhancing intervention efficacy, including improved self-efficacy and reduced rape myth acceptance in analogous high-stakes contexts, with extensions to general emergencies through targeted behavioral rehearsal.^[139]^[140] In disaster response, volunteer-led helping behaviors have been documented to save lives by providing immediate aid, with research contrasting individual versus collective motivations underscoring the value of pre-event training to foster prosocial norms.^[141]^[142] Recent empirical work from 2020 to 2025 highlights the adaptability of these applications, including programs that integrate behavioral insights to boost preparedness and overcome group dynamics in real-world crises. For example, training emphasizing individual agency has proven effective in increasing intervention rates among diverse populations, such as college students and military personnel, by addressing contextual inhibitors like affiliation biases.^[143]^[144] In broader disaster contexts, behavioral training enhances community resilience by promoting timely actions that reduce casualties and support recovery, though long-term retention requires repeated exposure.^[145] These interventions underscore causal links between trained helping behaviors and tangible outcomes, such as faster emergency reporting and aid provision, prioritizing empirical validation over anecdotal accounts.

Policy, Education, and Economic Contexts

Governments have implemented policies to encourage helping behavior through incentives for volunteering and charitable giving. In the United States, tax deductions for charitable contributions under Section 170 of the Internal Revenue Code allow donors to reduce taxable income, with evidence indicating that for every $1 forgone in tax revenue, charitable donations increase by $1.30.^[146] ^[147] A one percent increase in the tax cost of giving reduces charitable receipts by approximately four percent, demonstrating the sensitivity of donations to fiscal incentives.^[148] Federal policies also permit employees to use annual leave, flexible schedules, or compensatory time for volunteer activities, facilitating participation without financial penalty.^[149] These measures often aim to offset declining public expenditures on social services by substituting volunteer efforts, though effectiveness varies with economic conditions and program design.^[150] In educational settings, programs designed to foster prosocial behavior integrate activities promoting gratitude, kindness, and empathy into curricula, yielding improvements in student engagement, academic achievement, and peer relationships.^[151] ^[152] Social-emotional learning initiatives, increasingly embedded in early education worldwide, emphasize prosocial skills through structured interventions such as cooperative activities and perspective-taking exercises, with meta-analyses showing sustained effects on helping tendencies.^[153] ^[154] Evidence from experimental programs indicates that real-world prosocial training correlates with enhanced altruism in children, though long-term impacts depend on consistent reinforcement beyond school hours.^[155] Economically, helping behavior through volunteering contributes to societal value equivalent to billions in unpaid labor, enabling governments to curtail direct service provision while addressing gaps in areas like education and health.^[150] ^[156] However, participation declines in economically disadvantaged or high-inequality regions, where opportunity costs deter involvement, as higher income levels generally predict greater volunteering rates due to reduced personal financial strain.^[157] ^[158] While prosocial acts yield non-monetary benefits like improved well-being, they incur costs such as time and training needs, potentially leading to inefficiencies if volunteers lack preparation, underscoring the need for policies balancing incentives with support structures.^[159]

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The Role of Guilt and Empathy on Prosocial Behavior - PMC
Mar 1, 2022 · Research on the effects of guilt on interpersonal relationships has shown that guilt frequently motivates prosocial behavior in dyadic social situations.
[76]
[PDF] Guilt and Helping
(c) Guilt-produced motivation to help is not altruistic. Genuine altruistic motivation to perform an action is motivation concerned with the good of another ...Missing: aversion | Show results with:aversion
[77]
Valid theory-testing meta-analyses further question the negative ...
Valid theory-testing meta-analyses further question the negative state relief model of helping. Citation. Miller, N., & Carlson, M. (1990).
[78]
Generosity and guilt: The role of beliefs and moral standards of others
Intuitively, the guilt aversion model assumes that beliefs influence behaviour because people want to avoid letting others down by not living up to their ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[79]
What is moral about guilt? Acting “prosocially” at the disadvantage of ...
Many studies have shown that guilt, arguably the most exemplary moral emotion, indeed motivates prosocial behavior in dyadic social dilemma situations. When ...
[80]
A neurocomputational model of altruistic choice and its implications
We propose a neurocomputational model of altruistic choice and test it using behavioral and fMRI data from a task in which subjects make choices between real ...
[81]
Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility.
The presence of other bystanders reduced the individual's feelings of personal responsibility and lowered his speed of reporting.
[82]
Cross-Cultural Differences in Helping Strangers - Sage Journals
Large cross-cultural variation in helping emerged, ranging from an overall rate of 93% in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to 40% in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia.
[83]
(PDF) Cross-Cultural Differences in Helping Strangers - ResearchGate
Aug 7, 2025 · However, Levine et al. (2001) found no significant correlation between the collectivism-individualism dimension and willingness to help.
[84]
Lost letter experiment suggests wealthy London neighbourhoods ...
Aug 16, 2012 · The results show a strong negative effect of neighbourhood income deprivation on altruistic behaviour, with an average of 87% of letters dropped ...
[85]
Lost letter experiment suggests wealthy London neighborhoods are ...
Aug 15, 2012 · Neighborhood income deprivation has a strong negative effect on altruistic behavior when measured by a "lost letter" experiment.
[86]
Field evidence of other-regarding preferences in China
A large-scale lost letter experiment was conducted in Beijing, capital city of China. · The experiment aimed to test if the altruistic attribute of the letter ...
[87]
[PDF] Individual and community behavioral responses to natural disasters
Oct 28, 2020 · These studies and others provide considerable evidence that social bonds are produced or enhanced during disasters and that altruism plays an ...
[88]
Doing Good and Feeling Good: Relationships Between Altruism and ...
One meta-analysis found that younger altruists experience higher levels of well-being, beyond physical health, relative to older altruists, perhaps because ...
[89]
Prosociality predicts individual behavior and collective outcomes in ...
Indeed, previous empirical studies have found positive associations of patience and risk aversion with better health behaviors and outcomes both in the COVID-19 ...
[90]
The association between social support and prosocial behavior: A ...
Jul 21, 2024 · Research has shown that prosocial behavior is closely related to individuals' perceived interpersonal and organizational affiliations ...
[91]
Online Prosocial Behaviors: A Scoping Review of Definitions ...
May 2, 2025 · This scoping review aimed to identify (a) how online prosocial behavior is defined; (b) explore the types of online prosocial behavior people are engaging in;
[92]
How Self-Other Overlap Shapes Online Altruism in Adolescents
Feb 17, 2025 · This study explores the relationship between self-other overlap, empathy, moral identity, and adolescent online altruistic behavior.
[93]
The benefits of a school intervention for prosocial behaviour and ...
Feb 21, 2025 · The findings revealed increased altruistic behaviour, prosocial compliant behaviour, and well-being at post-intervention compared to baseline in ...Theoretical Background · Altruism Operationalisation... · Methods<|separator|>
[94]
Prosocial behaviourial spillover and nudging: A longitudinal quasi ...
Maner and Gailliot, 2007. J.K. Maner, M.T. Gailliot. Altruism and egoism: Prosocial motivations for helping depend on relationship context. European Journal of ...
[95]
Mortality salience and helping behavior amidst public crisis - Frontiers
Oct 7, 2024 · Our study provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between mortality salience and helping behaviors in the time of public crisis.
[96]
Prevalence and characteristics of infants' prosocial helping ...
This study investigated prosocial helping behaviors in a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 220 11- to 20-month-olds living in the United States.Method · Helping Tasks · Results<|control11|><|separator|>
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The dispositional basis of human prosociality - ScienceDirect.com
Highlights · There are stable individual differences in prosocial behavior. · One research approach has linked various personality traits to prosocial behavior.
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[PDF] Personality and Prosocial Behavior: A Theoretical Framework and ...
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 ...
[99]
Prosocial knowledge mediates effects of agreeableness and ...
The theoretical rationale for this finding is that personality traits influence prosocial behavior indirectly, through the acquisition of prosocial knowledge ( ...Personality And Individual... · Prosocial Knowledge Mediates... · General Discussion
[100]
Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour - PubMed Central - NIH
Empathy and prosocial behaviour are genetically influenced. A meta-analysis of twin studies found that genetic factors exert a moderate effect on individual ...
[101]
Is empathy associated with more prosocial behaviour? A meta ...
May 10, 2022 · Our conclusion is that there is a significant correlation between empathy and PB that is influenced by sample characteristics and methodological factors.Abstract · Method · Results · Discussion
[102]
Effect of Different Types of Empathy on Prosocial Behavior - Frontiers
Feb 16, 2022 · Empirical research has shown that empathy positively predicts prosocial behavior and that the higher level of empathy, the greater attention to ...
[103]
Gender and helping behavior: A meta-analytic review of the social ...
Results from a meta-analytic review of sex differences in 172 studies (appended) in helping behavior indicate that in general men helped more than women.
[104]
Age differences in prosociality across the adult lifespan: A meta ...
This meta-analysis offers new perspectives on age trajectories of prosociality, suggesting midlife as a potentially important phase of pronounced prosociality.
[105]
(PDF) Meta-Analyses of Age and Sex Differences in Children's and ...
all studies and study qualities, we found a significant,. positive effect size for age differences in prosocial behavior. Thus, our data support the conclusion ...
[106]
Positive mood and helping behavior: a test of six hypotheses
Past research has shown rather consistently that positive mood states lead to increased helpfulness.
[107]
Explanation of the relation between negative mood and helping.
Prior research addressing the relation between negative affect and helping behavior has yielded inconsistent results. ... The role of moods in helping behavior.
[108]
Everyday helping is associated with enhanced mood but greater ...
Oct 15, 2024 · Our results support previous work linking helping to enhanced mood but suggest that when helping is more effortful it is both preceded and followed by greater ...
[109]
a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and ...
The bystander effect is when the presence of others reduces the likelihood of an individual helping in a critical situation. This effect is attenuated in ...
[110]
Model, need, and cost effects in helping behavior. - APA PsycNet
The results showed that helping increased from control to generous model and from high to low cost, and decreased from control to selfish model.
[111]
Personal distress and the influence of bystanders on responding to ...
Work by Clark and Word (1972) showed that the bystander effect is driven by ambiguity: Only during ambiguous situations was helping behavior reduced by the ...
[112]
Prosocial decision-making under time pressure: Behavioral and ...
Dec 1, 2023 · On the behavioral level, results showed that high time pressure had a significant effect on reducing participants' willingness to spend money ...
[113]
Prosocial Choices Under Time Pressure Reflect Context-Sensitive ...
Aug 22, 2022 · Time pressure is a powerful experimental manipulation frequently used to arbitrate between competing dual-process models of prosocial ...
[114]
More Individualism Means More Altruism - Reason Magazine
May 28, 2021 · The countries with more individualistic values are also the countries with higher levels of altruism, according to an upcoming study in the journal ...
[115]
Help others—be happy? The effect of altruistic behavior ... - Frontiers
Jun 22, 2023 · Altruism involves acting in a manner that will benefit others or increase another person's wellbeing and welfare (Batson and Shaw, 1991).
[116]
Horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism and ...
Altruism generally increases with collectivism, but declines with individualism. · Only horizontal collectivism is associated with greater preferences for ...
[117]
Helping behavior in rural and urban environments: A meta-analysis.
A meta-analytic review examined 65 tests of the hypothesis that country people are more helpful than city people.
[118]
[PDF] Helping Behavior in Urban and Rural Environments: Field Studies ...
Previous studies of urban-rural differences in helping behavior are contradictory. A number of methodological problems in previous research are noted, including.
[119]
Nature exposure and social health: Prosocial behavior, social ...
Nature exposure increases prosocial behavior, decreases antisocial behavior, and increases ratings of social connection and satisfaction.
[120]
Altruism | The Moral Psychology Handbook - Oxford Academic
Egoists maintain that all of our ultimate desires are selfish, and although altruists concede that some of our ultimate desires are selfish, they insist that ...
[121]
[PDF] Evidence for Altruism: Toward a Pluralism of Prosocial Motives
The suggestion that empathy evokes altruistic motivation has been called the empathy-altruism hypothesis (Batson,. 1987, in press). This hypothesis can be made ...<|separator|>
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[PDF] testing the empathy-altruism hypothesis - Minds@UW
Consequently, the AARH suggests that the ultimate goal of the motivation produced by empathic concern is to reduce the aversive experience of empathic concern.
[123]
Altruism versus Psychological Egoism: The Tendency to Engage in ...
Sep 14, 2015 · The current study looks at the prevalence of prosocial behaviour through two variables, individual traits of altruism and egoism.
[124]
Hamilton's rule predicts anticipated social support in humans
Sep 29, 2014 · We test Hamilton's rule in humans by seeing if the availability of help in times of crises is predicted by the degree of genetic relatedness. ...
[125]
Hamilton's rule in economic decision-making - PNAS
In this paper, we employ techniques borrowed from experimental economics to test the predictions of Hamilton's rule. We find strong support for the rule.
[126]
A Quantitative Test of Hamilton's Rule for the Evolution of Altruism
May 3, 2011 · In a seminal paper Hamilton showed that altruism can be selected for when rb − c>0, where c is the fitness cost to the altruist, b is the ...
[127]
Explaining human altruism | Synthese
Oct 5, 2020 · I defend the claim that human altruistic dispositions evolved through cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution and offer empirical ...2 Proximate Explanations · 3 Group Selection · 3.1 Genetic Group Selection
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The evolution of altruism and the serial rediscovery of the role of ...
Nov 2, 2020 · The canonical explanation for the evolution of altruism (“kin selection”)—which was mathematically derived in the 1960s by W. D. ...
[129]
Why isn't everyone an evolutionary psychologist? - PMC
Jul 30, 2014 · Here I explore a number of potential reasons for mainstream psychology continuing to ignore or resist an evolutionary approach.
[130]
[PDF] The Relation of Empathy to Prosocial and Related Behaviors
In a prior review involving a meta-analysis (Underwood & Moore, 1982), no relation between affec- tive empathy and prosocial behavior was found.<|separator|>
[131]
Against Empathy - Boston Review
Aug 20, 2014 · Against Empathy. Most people see the benefits of empathy as too obvious to require justification. Paul Bloom. With responses from.
[132]
The case against empathy - Vox
Jan 19, 2017 · Bloom uses clinical studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning.
[133]
Empathy moderates the relationship between cognitive load and ...
Jan 16, 2023 · Cognitive load reduces both empathy and prosocial behaviour. However, studies demonstrating these effects have induced cognitive load in a ...
[134]
Empathy as a “Risky Strength”: A Multilevel Examination of ... - NIH
The purpose of this review is to describe an empirically-grounded theoretical rationale for the hypothesis that empathic tendencies can be “risky strengths”.
[135]
The Limits of Empathy - Harvard Business Review
Though empathy is essential to leading and managing others—without it, you'll make disastrous decisions and forfeit the benefits just described—failing to ...
[136]
4 questions for Paul Bloom - American Psychological Association
May 1, 2017 · Bloom argues that it's overrated, and that using empathy as a moral guide leads to bad decisions. Below, he discusses why.
[137]
The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review on ... - APA PsycNet
Research on bystander intervention has produced a great number of studies showing that the presence of other people in a critical situation reduces the ...
[138]
Bystander Intervention Prior to The Arrival of Emergency Medical ...
A higher risk of patient death is likely to prompt bystander action. These novel study results can lead to more effective first aid training programs.
[139]
A systematic review and meta-analysis of bystander intervention ...
Jan 10, 2022 · Results: The bystander intervention programs were effective with a small-to-medium effect size (ES). The programs significantly affected seven ...
[140]
The Effectiveness of the Bringing in the Bystander™ Program ...
We found that students' (N = 164) bystander self-efficacy significantly increased and rape myth acceptance significantly decreased following training.
[141]
Helping behavior by bystanders: Contrasting individual vs social ...
The behavior of bystanders in emergencies and disasters have been examined for over 50 years. Such behaviors have been cited as contributing to saving lives ...
[142]
Helping behaviour of volunteers in providing post-disaster ...
This study explores the ways that volunteers help in overcoming the negative impacts of disasters.
[143]
Bystander Affiliation Influences Intervention Behavior - Sage Journals
Aug 25, 2021 · We found that participants were more likely to intervene when the bystanders were out-group with respect to the participant.
[144]
Engage: A bystander intervention training for U.S. Army soldiers
Research on bystander intervention suggests that effective training goes beyond simply telling individuals to act (Staub, Citation2023), and instead helps them ...
[145]
The role of individual preparedness and behavioural training in ...
Apr 15, 2024 · This study conducts a scoping review on a broad spectrum of publications relevant to individual disaster preparedness and training in natural hazards.
[146]
How Tax Policy Affects Charitable Giving - Philanthropy Roundtable
Jun 5, 2024 · In Other Words, for Every $1 Increase in the Tax Benefit, Dollars Donated to Charitable Causes Rise by a Statistically Significant $1.30.
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Tax Incentives Lead to More Money for Charities, Communities
Aug 2, 2024 · For every $1 the Treasury forgoes in potential revenues, the charitable deduction results in $1.30 making its way to public charities.
[148]
Do tax incentives affect charitable contributions? Evidence from ...
A one percent increase in the tax cost of giving causes charitable receipts to fall by about four percent, an effect three times larger the consensus in the ...
[149]
Participation in Volunteer Activities - OPM
Federal employees can use flexible schedules, annual leave, leave without pay, or compensatory time off for volunteer activities. Excused absence is possible ...
[150]
The Economics of Volunteerism: A Review - NCBI - NIH
First, all levels of government are encouraging volunteer work as a substitute for government's declining role in the provision of social services. Second, ...
[151]
How to Promote Prosocial Behaviors in the Classroom - Edutopia
Dec 11, 2019 · Here are three prosocial behaviors you can use today in your classroom: gratitude, kindness, and empathy.
[152]
Promoting prosocial behavior in the classroom and beyond
Feb 6, 2024 · Bergin's decades of research shows that this focus on soft skills improves student engagement, academic achievement, relationships and peer-acceptance.
[153]
[PDF] School Intervention and Prosocial Behaviour
Work to promote prosocial behaviours in schools can now be found throughout the world. Efforts to make social-emotional learning an integral part of early ...
[154]
Evidence-based interventions for promoting prosocial behavior in ...
Authors report different approaches to promote prosocial behavior in schools, such as structural interventions composed of activities added to regular school ...
[155]
Are Real-World Prosociality Programs Associated with Greater ...
Using both a correlational study and pre-registered experiment, we tested whether two school programs designed to foster prosocial behavior in children—one ...
[156]
[PDF] The Effective Use of Volunteers: Best Practices for the Public Sector
Jun 22, 2000 · MAJOR POLICY AREAS OF VOLUNTEER ACTIVITY IN GOVERNMENT. Policy Area. Percentage of. Volunteers in. Government. Education. 56.8. International ...<|separator|>
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New study links US decline in volunteering to economic conditions
Sep 17, 2024 · The researchers found that people living in disadvantaged communities or areas that have high levels of economic inequality were less likely to volunteer.
[158]
The Decline of Volunteering in the United States: Is it the Economy?
Aug 8, 2024 · This article investigates the complex interactions between local and national economic contexts and volunteering behavior.
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[PDF] “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”: The Costs of Helping Others
Jul 1, 2016 · The definition of cost used in this study is the perceived cognitive, emotional, or behavioral toll that participating in prosocial behavior has ...