Farrelly Daniel, Moan Emma, White Kristi, Young Sarah
Institute of Health and Society, University of Worcester, Worcester, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Sunderland, Sunderland, United Kingdom.
Eur J Psychol. 2015 Feb 27;11(1):100-11. doi: 10.5964/ejop.v11i1.855. eCollection 2015 Feb.
Research shows that altruistic behaviours arise in varying social situations in line with different theories of causes of such behaviours. However most research uses financial costs only, which makes our understanding of altruism currently limited. This study presents findings of three experiments that use a novel and simple laboratory-based task that measures altruism based on the amount of time participants are willing to spend as a cost to help others. This task assessed two specific theories; altruistic punishment (Experiments 1 & 2) and empathy-altruism (Experiment 3). All experiments showed that the task was successful, as participants were more likely to altruistically punish violators of social contracts than other scenarios (Experiments 1 and 2), and also incur more costs to behave altruistically towards others when feeling empathic than different emotional states (Experiment 3). These results provide clear support for the use and value of this novel task in future research.
研究表明，利他行为会在不同的社会情境中出现，这与关于此类行为成因的不同理论相符。然而，大多数研究仅使用金钱成本，这使得我们目前对利他主义的理解有限。本研究呈现了三项实验的结果，这些实验采用了一种新颖且简单的基于实验室的任务，该任务根据参与者愿意花费的时间量来衡量利他主义，而这一时间量被视为帮助他人的一种成本。这项任务评估了两种特定理论：利他惩罚（实验1和2）和共情 - 利他主义（实验3）。所有实验均表明该任务是成功的，因为与其他情境相比，参与者更有可能利他地惩罚违反社会契约的人（实验1和2），并且在产生共情时，相较于处于不同情绪状态，参与者会为向他人表现出利他行为而承担更多成本（实验3）。这些结果为这一新颖任务在未来研究中的应用和价值提供了明确支持。
