Socially desirable behavior that benefits others.

Abstract

Prosocial behaviors are an aspect of adolescents' positive development that has gained greater attention in the developmental literature since the 1990s. In this article, the authors review the literature pertaining to prosocial behaviors during adolescence. The authors begin by defining prosocial behaviors as prior theory and empirical studies have done. They describe antecedents to adolescents' prosocial behaviors with a focus on two primary factors: socialization and cultural orientations. Accordingly, the authors review prior literature on prosocial behaviors among different ethnic/cultural groups throughout this article. As limited studies have examined prosocial behaviors among some specific ethnic groups, the authors conclude with recommendations for future research.

Definitions

Prosocial behavior is a broad class of behavior defined as involving costs for the self and resulting in benefits for others. Where prosocial behavior results in net benefits for both the beneficiary and the person committing the prosocial act, it is referred to as mutualism. Where prosocial behavior benefits others but confers net costs to the person committing it, prosocial behavior becomes altruism (Bowles and Gintis, 2011). A common distinction is made between pure altruism and impure altruism. Pure altruism is “acting with the goal of benefitting another” (Piliavin and Charng, 1990); prosocial behavior solely motivated by concern for others, also denoted as ‘altruistic motivation.’ Impure altruism is prosocial behavior motivated by more self-centered motives or even by narrow self-interest, potentially in addition to concern for others. Note that the definition of prosocial behavior is purely behavioral, while altruism combines behavioral and motivational elements.

Prosocial behaviors, which are acts that are socially defined as generally beneficial to other people, are shaped by both cognitive (e.g., assessments of costs and rewards) and affective (e.g., arousal and emotion) processes. Empathy, an emotional response that stems from another person's need, is central to the affective processes. It can be measured using self-reports, nonverbal expressions, or psychophysiological indices. The strength and type of empathic response (e.g., experienced as sadness or concern) vary as a function of the closeness with the person in need, dispositional characteristics of the observer, and the nature of the situation. Empathic arousal interpreted as personally directed emotions, such as sadness or distress, promotes egoistically motivated prosocial behavior, with the primary goal of relieving this unpleasant state. In contrast, empathic arousal experienced as empathic concern produces altruistic motivation, with the primary goal of improving the other person's welfare. Although empathic arousal is most influential for spontaneous forms of prosocial action, developing a self-image of being empathic can facilitate longer-term commitments to helping and sustained volunteering. Thus empathy may represent a basic mechanism for translating genetic prosocial predispositions, which may have evolutionary benefits, into action.

Prosocial Behavior

Prosocial behavior refers to a range of positive behaviors including positive interactions (e.g., friendly play or peaceful conflict resolutions), altruism (e.g., sharing, offering help), and behaviors that reduce stereotypes (Mares and Woodard, 2007). Researchers who believe that media can influence prosocial behavior argue that depictions of prosocial behavior in the media are more consistent with social norms than antisocial behavior, and as a result, imitations of these behaviors are more likely to be received positively than imitation of antisocial acts (Rushton, 1979).

Since the late 1970s, more than 30 studies have been conducted to identify whether and how prosocial media content might contribute to prosocial behavior. These studies have largely focused upon the relationship between prosocial television content and subsequent prosocial behavior (e.g., Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Friedrich and Aletha Huston, 1973). A meta-analysis by Mares and Woodard (2007) revealed that children who watched more prosocial television content exhibited significantly more prosocial behavior. The overall effect size (r = 0.27) resulting from this meta-analysis is similar to that found in meta-analyses of the relationship between violent television content and subsequent aggression. Television is therefore just as prone to fostering prosocial behavior as it is to fostering aggression (Mares and Woodard, 2007). The relationship reported by Mares and Woodward was strongest when prosocial behaviors were explicitly modeled in the television show. Moreover, children's age moderated this relationship such that the effect of prosocial content increased sharply during early childhood, peaked at age 7 years, and then declined until and throughout the teen years. Mares and Woodard (2007) posit that the peak in middle childhood suggests that younger children may lack the cognitive ability to fully understand prosocial acts on television. More research is needed to understand why the relationship weakens after middle childhood. A possible explanation is that this decrease in effect is due to a dearth of developmentally appropriate prosocial television content available for older children.

Recent studies also suggest that interactive media that are designed to support prosocial behavior do work. In a series of studies conducted in three countries across three different age groups (i.e., middle childhood, adolescence, adults), researchers found robust evidence to support the argument that playing video games in which characters model prosocial behavior does increase short- and long-term prosocial behaviors (Gentile et al., 2009). Similar findings have been found by other scholars investigating the relationship between prosocial video game play and subsequent prosocial behavior, particularly in middle childhood and adolescence (Saleem et al., 2012).

Overall, the literature indicates that exposure to media that explicitly depict prosocial behavior does subsequently result in children enacting this behavior. This effect is most typically explained through Bandura's social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001) or via the general learning model (GLM) (Gentile et al., 2009). Both models focus on the imitation of modeled behaviors, although the GLM pays particular attention to affective, arousal, and cognitive effects during media use. These theories have helped researchers identify why prosocial media content can be beneficial for children, yet there remain many unanswered questions. In particular, more research is needed to identify best practices when creating prosocial media content for children. We also know little about the role of individual differences in determining who is exposed to prosocial content and how individual differences impact processing of this content.

Abstract

Children's prosocial behaviors include acts such as sharing, helping, comforting, cooperating, and can come to involve complex behaviors such as lying to protect someone's feelings. Because prosocial behaviors are performed for diverse reasons, both moral and nonmoral, research findings on prosociality in children are complex, although clear age trends are present. A variety of theories attempt to explain children's prosocial development, each providing insights into certain aspects. Although cultural influences are evident throughout the development of prosocial behavior, future research will need to untangle the true significance of these influences.

Prosocial Behavior in Infancy

Prosocial behavior in infancy is distinguished by great diversity and marked developmental change. The earliest manifestations of prosocial behaviors, traditionally defined as any intentional action that benefits another person (e.g., Grusec et al., 2002; Eisenberg et al., 2006), appear near the end of the first year of life (Hay and Cook, 2007), although some nascent forms of prosociality may appear earlier. These acts become progressively more coordinated, socially skilled, and often more frequent by the end of the third year (Hay and Cook, 2007) in concert with developing social, cognitive, language, and motor abilities (Moore, 2007).

Initial work on infants' prosociality focused on empathic responding, including both concerned attention and attempts to understand another's distress, and efforts to comfort the distressed other (e.g., Zahn-Waxler et al., 1979; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992; Dunn, 1988; Rheingold, 1982; see Eisenberg et al., 2006 for a review). In the decades that followed these seminal works, researchers have uncovered a wide range of prosocial behaviors that infants exhibit in varied contexts and with different people (e.g., parents, siblings, peers, unfamiliar adults). Included on this spectrum are helping, sharing, cooperating, and comforting, as well as less prototypical behaviors such as informative pointing and participating in household chores. These behaviors are ubiquitous, often spontaneous, and enthusiastic.

In contrast to the broad picture of infant prosociality painted by this earlier research, recent investigations have explored its more fine-grained aspects and revealed some puzzling patterns. First, among toddlers, different prosocial behaviors are often uncorrelated with one another (Dunfield et al., 2011; Hay and Cook, 2007), suggesting that young children are not uniformly prosocial. Moreover, early prosocial behavior has been positively associated with aggression (Hay, 2006), and young children frequently ignore another's distress or exacerbate the victim's plight rather than exhibit concern or offer comfort (Dunn, 1988). These findings stand in stark contrast to the notion that prosocial behavior is a stable, early appearing, unified construct that governs much of early social interaction.

Knowledge of cultural variations in infant prosocial responding may contribute to our understanding of its development as well as its diversity. Although few in number, extant cross-cultural examinations of infant behavior reveal cultural differences in rates of prosocial responding in infants (Callaghan et al., 2011), how parents socialize prosociality in their infants (Mosier and Rogoff, 2003), and the mechanisms that motivate prosocial behavior (Kärtner et al., 2010).

In the following sections, we first describe the different types of prosocial behaviors children exhibit in infancy and how they change over the first few years of life. We then reflect on the developmental trends and multidimensionality of prosocial behavior. Finally, we consider cultural variations in early prosocial responding.

What Is Prosocial Behavior and How Does It Develop?

Prosocial behavior is defined as ‘voluntary behavior intended to benefit another’ (Eisenberg et al., 2006). It is characterized by acts of kindness, compassion, and helping behaviors, which many consider to be one of the finest qualities of human nature.

Typical examples of prosocial behavior include volunteering, sharing toys, treats or food with friends, instrumental help (e.g., helping a peer with school assignments), costly help (e.g., risking own life to save others), and emotionally supporting others in distress (e.g., comforting a peer following a disappointing experience or caring for a person not feeling well). Empathy is considered as the emotion that provides both the foundation for prosocial development and the mechanism for social influence over behavior (Hastings et al., 2007).

According to both Hoffman's theory (2000) and ample empirical findings, prosocial behavior and empathy emerge early in life and develop until at least early adulthood. At its beginning, prosociality is assumed to be primarily self-oriented. It has been argued (Hoffman, 2000) that infants feel self-distress in reaction to the distress of others because they are incapable of differentiating their own experiences from those of others. Although recently evidence has accumulated showing that empathy emerges earlier than previously thought (Roth-Hanania et al., 2011), there is an overall agreement that prosocial behavior becomes increasingly other-oriented over the course of development. Gradually, self-distress is replaced by other-oriented concern, requiring some understanding of others' mental states (Hoffman, 2000). Several studies have documented the enactment of prosocial behaviors such as sharing, helping, and showing compassion as early as the second year of life and find the maximum growth in maturity and frequency of prosocial behaviors in the toddler and preschooler period (Eisenberg et al., 2006). From childhood to adolescence, further increases are found in sharing, and less so in helping or providing emotional support. The boost in prosocial behavior with age is attributed to developmental increases in cognitive abilities associated with detecting others' needs and determining ways to help, in empathy-related responding, and in the moral understanding of the importance of helping others (Eisenberg et al., 2006).

However, because of its rather broad definition, it has been difficult to determine the exact developmental course of prosocial behavior. For example, Eisenberg and Fabes' (1998) meta-analysis found that prosocial behavior increases with age, but that the increases vary in size depending on the methodological aspects of each study. In a similar vein, investigators have not always found correlations between indices of prosociality. Prosocial behavior can include a variety of observable behaviors (e.g., helping, sharing, comforting, cooperating, and showing compassion) that may be driven by rather different motivations (e.g., the wish to benefit the other, self-interest, or practical concerns); they may be accompanied by different emotions (e.g., empathy, sympathy, or distress), and based on different cognitions (i.e., differing interpretations of situational cues). These different motivations and manifestations may reflect important distinctions for understanding prosocial behavior and its development, but relatively little socialization research has addressed this issue. There are various indications that, even within a culture, measuring prosocial behavior and development is moderated by factors such as age, sex, and the specific operationalizations involved. For example, when studying the development of children's willingness to make costly prosocial choices, it matters whether the observed child population comes from a high or a low SES background (Benenson et al., 2007). The willingness to share or to cooperate varies with the age and the sex of the person in need of it. Similarly, helping or sharing with an unknown other or with an acquaintance (Fehr et al., 2008) has neither theoretically nor practically the same meaning.

Classic operationalizations to study such voluntary prosocial acts guided by internalized values and goals rather than by the expectation of concrete or social rewards or the avoidance of punishment, include testing children's self-initiated willingness to share their resources such as food (i.e., chocolate) with an unknown stranger or to help a distressed person, who has dropped, broken, or lost something.

Such operationalizations are useful measures of spontaneous selfless acts, but admittedly they do not capture the various forms of human prosociality. Moreover, as elaborated later, neither the above-mentioned conceptualization of prosocial behavior nor the ways in which it is studied bear up in a cross-cultural comparison.

Prosocial Behavior and Empathy (in Adulthood)

Prosocial behavior represents a broad category of acts, such as helping, sharing, comforting, donating, or volunteering, and cooperation, that are intended to benefit others. Research on prosocial behavior has addressed not only the antecedents and consequences of these actions, but also the different motivations that may underlie these behaviors. Prosocial actions can be either altruistically or egoistically motivated (Batson, 2011). Altruistic motivation has the ultimate goal of increasing another person's welfare; egoistic motivation has the primary objective of improving one's own welfare. In addition, prosocial behaviors are shaped by both cognitive (e.g., assessments of costs and rewards) and affective (e.g., arousal and emotion) processes.

Empathy is a response that ‘stems from another's emotional state or condition, is congruent with the other's emotional state or condition, and involves at least a minimal degree of differentiation between the self and the other’ (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990: p. 132). It also involves both cognitive and emotional processes. Empathy can be measured using self-reports, nonverbal expressions, or psychophysiological indices. Socialization influences the extent to which people experience empathy for others. Children whose mothers are empathic, warm, good at perspective taking, and comforting are more likely to become highly empathic themselves. Women report higher levels of empathy than men, even when they physiologically show similar levels of arousal.

Empathy also appears to have biological and genetic components. Empathic responses are found in most species and are present among human infants shortly after birth. Brain-imaging studies support the idea that humans are hard-wired to be empathic. The human brain contains mirror neurons, which are cells that become activated when observing others' behaviors in ways as if observers themselves were engaging in that behavior. Although there is some controversy about when and how mirror neurons function, they do represent a structure in the brain that bridges the experiences of others with people's own experience (Zaki and Ochsner, 2012). In addition, empathy is a genetically heritable trait: Identical twins have more similar levels of empathy than fraternal twins or siblings. These findings indicate that empathy is a basic human capacity and may represent a basic mechanism for translating genetic prosocial predispositions, which may have evolutionary benefits, into action.

There is substantial empirical evidence that people are fundamentally empathic and emotionally responsive to the needs of others. People are aroused physiologically and subjectively by the distress of others. This reaction appears even among very young children and occurs across cultures. In addition, people show greater empathy toward others who are closer and more similar to them.

Different kinds of empathy produce different types of responses. Cognitive empathy represents the process by which individuals are able to adopt the perspective of another person, imagining what the other person thinks and feels. When people feel that they can relate to others and adopt their perspective, they show patterns of neurological activity similar to those that occur when they personally experience such an event. Emotional empathy relates to the affective response that stems from recognizing another person's need. It is associated with psychophysiological arousal, such as increased heart-rate. How people experience that arousal emotionally – whether as sadness, personal distress, or empathic concern – depends upon the magnitude of the arousal, the closeness with the person in need, the nature of the situation, and dispositional characteristics of the observer. Some people tend to experience empathic arousal more strongly, some have more difficulty regulating their arousal once it occurs, and some people are more inclined to experience one emotion over other emotions. Although cognitive empathy typically arouses some degree of emotional empathy, people can take the perspective of others without having a significant emotional reaction. In addition, people can experience emotional empathy spontaneously, without consciously adopting the perspective of the other person. Both cognitive and emotional empathy can motivate prosocial behavior.

Operationalizing Prosocial Behavior for Cross-Population Studies

Intuitively, prosocial behavior can include donating money to charity, volunteering time at a soup kitchen, helping a friend with homework, following rules of good behavior, protecting the weak, and keeping the peace. Psychology has a rich tradition of studying prosocial behavior, and researchers have proposed a diverse set of definitions for the concept (Batson and Powell, 2003; Eisenberg et al., 2007; Penner et al., 2006). Most definitions concur that a prosocial act benefits others, but they differ in more fine-grained requirements about intention, motivation, and the cost to the actor. Was the benefit intended? Was the behavior voluntary or intrinsically motivated? Did the actor incur a cost? Here, we consider prosocial behavior in its broadest sense – acts that benefit others – understanding that it may be important to consider these more fine-grained questions when studying any specific behavior.

Within this broad set of behaviors, Batson also outlines three major classes: (1) aiding another person, (2) contributing to a group, and (3) following a socially valued rule, such as being honest or respecting another's property (Batson and Powell, 2003). Researchers have used several methods for assessing and comparing these different kinds of prosocial behaviors across populations, including asking people how they would respond in hypothetical scenarios (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1997; Gelfand et al., 2011), examining allocations of real money and other goods in behavioral experiments (Henrich et al., 2005, 2010a; Buchan et al., 2009; Herrmann et al., 2008; Rustagi et al., 2010), and observing how people help when confronted with experimenter-created situations in the real world (Levine et al., 2001). In this article, we focus primarily on studies of real rather than hypothetical behavior, which are currently limited to a few kinds of prosocial acts: (1) helping a stranger (Levine et al., 2001), (2) sharing a pot of money or goods with an anonymous stranger (Henrich et al., 2005, 2010a), (3) sacrificing to punish a cheater (Henrich et al., 2010a, 2006), (4) contributing to a public good (Herrmann et al., 2008; Rustagi et al., 2010; Buchan et al., 2009), (5) following an explicit rule for allocating goods (Hruschka et al., 2014), and (6) reciprocating a transfer of goods (Vollan, 2012).

3 Gender Differences

Gender stereotypes regarding sex differences in prosocial behavior are common in American culture and probably in numerous other cultures. In general, girls and women are expected to be more caring and to engage in more prosocial behaviors than are boys and men. Consistent with the stereotype, in meta-analytic analyses, effect sizes indicate that girls reliably display greater prosocial tendencies than do boys. For example, in 1998, Eisenberg and Fabes found that girls evidenced considerably greater kindness and consideration for others than did boys (d = .42). Likewise, girls shared and donated more than did boys, although not to such a marked extent (d = .13), and also provided somewhat more instrumental help (d = .14). In additional meta-analyses, investigators found that girls exhibited greater empathy and sympathy than did boys, at least on some types of measures (e.g., self-reports, some observed behavioral measures). In 1999, Fabes and colleagues noted that these sex differences in prosocial tendencies become stronger during adolescence as compared with early and middle childhood. Thus, there is support for a developmental change in the expression of prosocial behaviors.

In contrast, examination of sex differences in adults’ prosocial behaviors has provided mixed results. In 1986, Eagly and Crowley found that men, but not women, generally exhibited considerably greater helping (d = .34). However, many of the studies with adults involved helping strangers and performing instrumental tasks (e.g., changing a tire). These authors suggested that men’s greater helping likely reflects the conventional gender role-rooted expectation for men to enact agentic behaviors or to “rescue” others (i.e., behave chivalrously) and that the findings likely differed for prosocial behaviors involving both caring and recipients who are known.

Consistent with Eagly and Crowley’s speculations, women have been found to display greater prosocial tendencies than have men with regard to other indexes of prosociality. For example, women deliver messages containing greater emotional support and report more sympathy and empathy than do men, both on questionnaires and after being exposed to empathy-inducing stimuli, although they generally do not differ on physiological or facial measures of empathy. Furthermore, adolescent girls and adult women generally score higher on caring and other-oriented moral reasoning.

It is important to emphasize that the strength of sex differences fluctuated greatly across studies included in the aforementioned meta-analyses. Myriad factors, such as the design of the study, account for some degree of the difference between women and men. Nonetheless, the data do support the legitimacy of the stereotypes regarding sex differences in prosocial behaviors, at least when taking into account the type of helping behavior. However, the finding that sex differences in empathy and sympathy are stronger for self-reports than for other methods of assessment is consistent with the notion that people likely perceive a greater gender difference in prosocial tendencies than actually exists and respond accordingly.