Browsing by Subject "prosocial"

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    Adaptive Motivations Drive Concern for Common Good Resources
    (2019) Bowie, Aleah C

    Humans universally demonstrate intrinsically motivated prosocial behavior towards kin, non-kin ingroup members, and strangers. However, humans struggle to extend the same prosocial behavior to more abstract concepts like future-others and non-human species. The Adaptive Motivation Hypothesis posits that humans evolved intrinsic motivations to act prosocially towards more tangible social partners like those within an individual’s ingroup, but prosocial behavior towards more distant and abstract partners is constrained by ecological certainty. Prosocial behavior towards these more abstract concepts is more variable and more likely motivated by extrinsic reward. This dissertation aims to examine the development of motivations for prosocial behavior towards these more abstract concepts. My studies rely on common goods games as a proxy for examining behavior towards abstract recipients of prosocial behavior. Common goods are any resource like forests or fisheries that are non-excludable to a population, but rivalrous. In-demand common goods require cooperation of humans to ensure sustainable use in order to avoid depletion. Chapter One examined how children in three populations that differed in ecological certainty behaved in a common goods game where they were asked to contribute portions of their personal endowment to the maintenance of a forest. Participants were either provided a high extrinsic motivation, a low extrinsic motivation, or no extrinsic motivation for contributing to the maintenance of the common good. Results show that overall, children of all ages were more motivated to contribute to abstract recipients when extrinsic motivation is high. However, noticeable variation in behavior between populations was driven by ecological and cultural differences. Chapter Two examined whether aggregated extrinsic rewards increased contributions to common goods in a sample of children aged six to fourteen. Results suggest that both information about personal loss and delay in an acquiring resource together dramatically increase children’s contributions to common goods within both experimental and real-world contexts. Chapter Three explores whether making a typically abstract social partner more tangible increases an individual’s prosocial behavior towards said partner. Results for Chapter Three, conducted with a population in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, find that increasingly the tangibility of an abstract population marginally increases prosocial behavior in children but not in adults. Together, the results of these studies have implications improved understanding of the development of prosocial motivations in school age children, as well as applications to understanding motivations for socially conscious behavior in the face of environmental and conservation dilemmas.

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    Stressed People Don’t Pay It Forward: The Detrimental Effect of Stress on Generalized Reciprocity
    (2023-04) Greenleaf, Anna S.
    Generalized reciprocity, where individuals help others who can pay forward the generosity they receive to a third party, is common in a variety of settings, including workplaces. Stress is omnipresent in these contexts and is becoming more prevalent. Past research has examined the effects of stress on several other key forms of prosocial behavior. What remains unclear is how stress intersects with starting a chain of generalized reciprocity and “paying it forward” – helping others when one has been helped. In an experiment, I find that in line with past work, acute stress reduces the likelihood that people will be generous in a baseline giving decision. Further, I find that stress moderates people’s responses to being treated generously versus selfishly. Individuals are more likely to give when they have received generosity (been given to), and are more likely to keep their resources when they have received selfishness (not been given to). These conclusions, which replicate prior studies, hold true under conditions of relatively low stress. However, when individuals experience high levels of stress, beneficiaries give to third parties at similar rates, regardless of whether they received generosity or selfishness. Thus, stress levels are critical for understanding whether people will pay it forward. The results may be explained by cognitive load: individuals experiencing more stress, and thus higher cognitive load, are unable to deliberate, nor use information to behave strategically. These findings show that stress can be detrimental, as it harms the ability for 1) generalized reciprocity to be perpetuated even when others have behaved generously, and 2) makes it harder for individuals to protect themselves and their resources when they have been treated unfairly.