Assignment: Prosocial Behavior

Assignment: Prosocial Behavior

Assignment: Prosocial Behavior

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For this exercise, pick one day and seek to structure your thoughts and behaviors entirely around helping others. With each interaction or action you take, pause to think and ask yourself “is there a way I might help another here?” Hold a door for someone, offer your seat, share a smile, give a sincere compliment, show empathy to another, attempt to be more patient or understanding, etc. Your efforts should be in social settings that involve interactions with others (rather than something such as donating to a charity for instance). The goal is to be as thoughtfully prosocial in your interactions throughout the day as possible. At the beginning of the day, jot down your general mood, feelings, attitude, etc. Then throughout the day, whenever possible, carry a small notebook with you or make notes in an app on your phone to jot down meaningful encounters or experiences as you attempt to engage in prosocial behaviors. At the end of the day, again reflect and take notes on how you feel, your general mood, feelings and attitudes, etc. In a 5-7 slide PowerPoint presentation, not counting title or reference slides:

Summarize your experience. Describe the prosocial behaviors you engaged in, others’ reactions to these behaviors, and your assessment of any changes in mood, attitude, good fortune, or anything else of note you experienced. Review what you have learned about human behavior in social settings this week in your readings and CogBooks activities. Connect what you learned or experienced through your day of conscious, prosocial behavior with the terms, concepts, and theories from your research.

Decades of research document individual differences in prosocial behavior using controlled experiments that model social interactions in situations of interdependence. However, theoretical and empirical integration of the vast literature on the predictive validity of personality traits to account for these individual differences is missing. Here, we present a theoretical framework that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations (i.e., exploitation, reciprocity, temporal conflict, and dependence under uncertainty) and more specific subaffordances within certain types of interdependent situations (e.g., possibility to increase equality in outcomes) that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior. To test this framework, we meta-analyzed 770 studies reporting on 3,523 effects of 8 broad and 43 narrow personality traits on prosocial behavior in interdependent situations modeled in 6 commonly studied economic games (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Public Goods Game, and Commons Dilemma). Overall, meta-analytic correlations ranged between −.18 ≤ ρ̂ ≤ .26, and most traits yielding a significant relation to prosocial behavior had conceptual links to the affordances provided in interdependent situations, most prominently the possibility for exploitation. Moreover, for several traits, correlations within games followed the predicted pattern derived from a theoretical analysis of affordances. 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 meta-analysis provides a theoretical foundation that can guide future research on prosocial behavior and advance our understanding of individual differences in human prosociality. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved). Impact Statement – Public Significance Statement—This meta-analysis provides a theoretical framework and empirical test identifying when, how, and which of 51 personality traits account for individual variation in prosocial behavior. The meta-analysis shows that the relations between personality traits and prosocial behavior can be understood in terms of a few situational affordances (e.g., a possibility for exploitation, a possibility for reciprocity, dependence on others under uncertainty) that allow specific traits to become expressed in behavior across a variety of interdependent situations. As such, the meta-analysis provides a theoretical basis for understanding individual differences in prosocial behavior in various situations that individuals face in their everyday social interactions. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

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