Ryan A Dawn, O'Connor Brendan Bo, Schacter Daniel L, Campbell Karen L
Department of Psychology, Brock University, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University at Albany, SUNY.
J Appl Res Mem Cogn. 2023 Sep;12(3):443-456. doi: 10.1037/mac0000073. Epub 2022 Oct 20.
Imagining helping a person in need increases one's willingness to help beyond levels evoked by passively reading the same stories. We examined whether episodic simulation can increase younger and older adults' willingness to help in novel scenarios posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 3 studies we demonstrate that episodic simulation of helping behavior increases younger and older adults' willingness to help during both everyday and COVID-related scenarios. Moreover, we show that imagining helping increases emotional concern, scene imagery, and theory of mind, which in turn relate to increased willingness to help. Studies 2 and 3 also showed that people produce more internal, episodic-like details when imagining everyday compared to COVID-related scenarios, suggesting that people are less able to draw on prior experiences when simulating such novel events. These findings suggest that encouraging engagement with stories of people in need by imagining helping can increase willingness to help during the pandemic.
想象帮助有需要的人会增强一个人的助人意愿，使其超出被动阅读相同故事所引发的程度。我们研究了情景模拟是否能增强年轻人和老年人在新冠疫情带来的新情景下提供帮助的意愿。在三项研究中，我们证明了对帮助行为的情景模拟会增强年轻人和老年人在日常情景以及与新冠疫情相关情景下提供帮助的意愿。此外，我们表明想象帮助会增加情感关怀、情景意象和心理理论，而这反过来又与助人意愿的增强有关。研究2和研究3还表明，与想象与新冠疫情相关的情景相比，人们在想象日常情景时会产生更多内在的、类似情景的细节，这表明人们在模拟此类新事件时较难借鉴以往的经验。这些发现表明，通过想象帮助来鼓励人们参与有需要之人的故事，可以增强在疫情期间提供帮助的意愿。
