Böckler Anne
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070 Würzburg, Germany.
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Anthropol Anz. 2019 Sep 1;76(3):181-194. doi: 10.1127/anthranz/2019/0880.
In order to accomplish the benefits and overcome the difficulties associated with group living, societies critically depend on prosocial behaviors of their members. With various disciplines exploring the preconditions and constraints of altruism and cooperation, psychological research is concerned with the motivations that underlie human prosociality. The present paper summarizes the respective literature, starting out with an overview of the measures most commonly employed to assess prosocial tendencies in the laboratory. In short, psychologists make use of (i) questionnaires in which people rate their own traits, attitudes and behaviors, employ (ii) game theoretical paradigms that aim to enhance objectivity by means of anonymity and real monetary earnings and observe (iii) behavior in controlled, but realistically complex environments. The subsequent section addresses the issue how these measures can be structured and summarizes results of a recent study that categorized the various measurement methods. Specifically, the authors propose a framework of human prosociality that assumes three distinct motivation-based sub-components: reflecting the genuine aim to enhance others' well-being, referring to the tendency to enforce social norms and as the inclination to perceive and describe oneself as a good person. The third section outlines situational and personal factors that influence prosocial behavior, specifically focusing on socio-affective and socio-cognitive facets. This part demonstrates that the proposed sub-components of prosocial behavior are differentially related to some of the personal moderators, for instance to gender, cognitive skills, trait affect and narcissism, which corroborates the framework of distinct aspects of prosociality. Finally, I briefly summarize attempts to enhance prosocial behavior by altering its situational, biological or personal preconditions. The influence of meditation-based trainings has received increasing attention during the last decade, and differential effects of these interventions on the facets of prosociality further support the idea that distinct motivations drive the different behavioral tendencies.
为了实现群居生活带来的益处并克服与之相关的困难，社会严重依赖其成员的亲社会行为。随着各学科探索利他主义与合作的前提条件和制约因素，心理学研究关注人类亲社会行为背后的动机。本文总结了相关文献，首先概述了实验室中最常用于评估亲社会倾向的方法。简而言之，心理学家利用：（i）人们对自己的特质、态度和行为进行评分的问卷；采用（ii）旨在通过匿名和实际金钱收益提高客观性的博弈论范式；观察（iii）在可控但现实复杂环境中的行为。随后的部分讨论了如何构建这些测量方法的问题，并总结了最近一项对各种测量方法进行分类的研究结果。具体而言，作者提出了一个人类亲社会行为的框架，该框架假设有三个基于动机的不同子成分：反映增进他人福祉的真正目的；指强化社会规范的倾向；以及将自己视为好人的感知和描述倾向。第三部分概述了影响亲社会行为的情境和个人因素，特别关注社会情感和社会认知方面。这部分表明，亲社会行为的提议子成分与一些个人调节因素存在不同程度的关联，例如与性别、认知技能、特质情感和自恋，这证实了亲社会行为不同方面的框架。最后，我简要总结了通过改变亲社会行为的情境、生物或个人前提条件来增强亲社会行为的尝试。在过去十年中，基于冥想的训练的影响受到了越来越多的关注，这些干预对亲社会行为各方面的不同影响进一步支持了不同动机驱动不同行为倾向的观点。
