Before we begin, let’s define what we mean by prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior is action by an individual that is intended to benefit another individual or set of individuals. Defined in this way, many of the actions of artists such as Vincent van Gogh, actors such as Meryl Streep, entertainers such as Beyoncé, scientists such as Louis Pasteur, and political figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. can be considered prosocial behavior. Many people have benefited from the artistic creations, scientific discoveries, and social changes initiated by such esteemed individuals whether they starred in our favorite movies, developed life-saving vaccines, or led the struggle for civil rights. Although these individuals often may be motivated by the desire for money, fame, or self-expression, they also often, if not usually, intend to produce things of value to others. For example, when Van Gogh painted The Potato Eaters, he not only wanted to create art that others would appreciate and enjoy but also wanted to draw attention to the difficult lives of the people he portrayed.

Although it is important to acknowledge these forms of prosocial behavior, theory and research on prosocial behavior generally have not focused on people with extraordinary talent. Instead, most of this work studies the factors that influence whether ordinary people choose to help or not help each other from day to day. Sometimes the kind of help people give is quite minor, such as stopping to help someone pick up a bag of groceries that has spilled. Other times, it can be much more dramatic, such as providing CPR to someone who has collapsed. Some instances of helping come at personal cost or physical risk. Other times, the person giving help benefits as much, if not more than, the person receiving help.

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Psychologists often take it as an assumption that people’s actions are motivated primarily by some degree of self-interest. This perspective is at the heart of the functional approach, posited by William James when he first developed psychology as a discipline in America in the late 1800s. Consequently, even though prosocial behavior is directed toward the benefit of someone else, theorists have often posited self-serving or egoistic motivations for helping. As Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” In terms of broad motivations that guide human behavior, helping others can enhance people’s self-esteem and sense of significance within the context of their worldview. When they follow their internalized morals and social norms—that is, they do the right thing—people can feel good about themselves and their value in the larger scheme of things. Prosocial behavior also can serve more circumscribed goals, such as making the helper better liked or giving the helper a better sense of being socially accepted in a group. We might help a teacher so we can get a letter of recommendation for graduate school; an attractive individual so we can get a date; or a high-status person so we can get a job, entry into a club, or some other favor in return.

However, being social animals, we don’t care only about ourselves. We also genuinely care about those with whom we form emotional attachments—our families, our relationship partners, our friends, our group members, our pets, and perhaps anyone in distress with whom we identify. The staunchest advocate of this position, the social psychologist Dan Batson (e.g., 1991), asserts that helping is often the result of altruistic motivation, a desire to help another person purely for the other person’s benefit, regardless of whether there is any benefit to the self. He argues that when we feel empathy for another person, we help not to serve our own needs but rather to serve the needs of the other. This kind of helping is known as altruism.

Dramatic examples of altruism occur when people risk their lives to help unrelated others. During the Nazi occupation of Europe, a substantial number of non-Jewish individuals protected Jews whom the Nazis would have killed outright or sent to concentration camps. When asked in interviews why they put their own lives on the line to protect others, many of them complete strangers, these rescuers reported being motivated by either of two factors (Fogelman & Wiener, 1985). In many cases, they wanted to live up to deeply held moral values passed down to them by their parents and learned through their religious upbringing. In other cases, they were motivated by feelings of empathy, either because members of their own group also had been persecuted or because they had personal affection for the victims. For example, the German journalist Gitta Bauer described her experience protecting Ilse Mosle, the 17-year-old daughter of Jewish friends, by saying, “It took me nine months to deliver her to freedom, so I consider Ilse my baby” (Fogelman & Wiener, 1985, p. 233).

If you take an evolutionary perspective on human behavior, you might think that people who risk their lives to save others from the Nazis, or who throw themselves into raging rivers to save a stranger, are acting very strangely. After all, a core assumption of evolutionary theory is that species evolve new traits and behavioral tendencies when those attributes benefit the propagation of an organism’s genes to the next generation. We might therefore expect people to care only about their own well-being and reproductive opportunities. But our inherited propensities are far more complicated than that and encourage prosocial behavior in a variety of ways.

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Kin Selection: Hey, Nice Genes!

A propensity for helping close relatives, or kin, may have been selected for over the course of hominid evolution. The idea that natural selection led to greater tendencies to help close kin as opposed to those who are less genetically related is known as kin selection (Hamilton, 1964). The principle underlying kin selection is that because close relatives share many genes with an individual, when the individual helps close kin, those shared genes are more likely to be passed on to offspring. In this way, genes promoting the propensity for helping close kin become more prevalent in future generations. In support of this idea, people report that they are more likely to help another person the closer their genetic relationship (Burnstein et al., 1994). Regardless of whether they are risking their lives or merely lending a hand, people report being more helpful to parents and siblings than to cousins, aunts, and uncles. Also, they are more likely to help distant relatives than acquaintances or strangers. What’s more, these findings hold up across very different cultures (Madsen et al., 2007).

Although the idea of kin selection is popular with evolutionary psychologists and some biologists, its role in human prosocial behavior is difficult to isolate. Cultures invariably teach people that they are obligated to help close relatives, so we don’t know how much of the preference for helping close kin is innate and how much culturally learned. In addition, it is important to acknowledge that many examples of human helping cannot be explained by kin selection. These include devoted parents who raise adopted children; people from developed countries who give to charities such as CARE and UNICEF; individuals who would more readily help a good friend than a disliked first cousin; and good Samaritans, who, at great personal risk, help complete strangers and unrelated friends.

Sociability, Attachment, and Helping

Why do people like Joe Delaney (see Social Psych Out in the World) help when it clearly doesn’t serve their interests to do so? One key answer is that our evolutionary history likely selected for a general proclivity to be helpful. This inherited propensity can lead to behaviors that sometimes will prevent the transmission of an individual’s genes, even though on average, across people and situations, they may have adaptive value. As we noted in chapter 2, our hominid ancestors lived in small groups in which members were successful by caring about others: emotionally attaching to them, caring for and cooperating with them, fitting in with the group, trying to be liked and to live up to internalized morals. These bonds with others are associated with an innate capacity to experience certain emotions that foster helping: sympathy, empathy, compassion, and guilt. Thus, prosocial behavior arises from our evolved proclivities for sociability and forming close attachments and the emotions these proclivities arouse. They are the bases for the human propensity to engage in prosocial behavior. We help because we care.

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Reciprocal Helping

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested another explanation of why helping is such a prominent aspect of human behavior. Recall that we’ve already covered some of the surprising examples of what humans can achieve through cooperation (see chapter 9). In fact, cooperation itself can be viewed as a form of prosocial behavior. Cooperating with others for a common goal or to combat a common enemy means placing a certain amount of trust in someone else. If I help you today, you might be more likely to help me tomorrow, and that, my friends, could give me a genetic advantage over the grumpy lout who never does anything for anyone else. This pattern of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours is referred to as the norm of reciprocity. Evolutionary theory suggests that patterns of reciprocity can provide individuals or even groups with an adaptive advantage (Trivers, 1971).

Reciprocal helping can be found in numerous animal species, including in (as we noted in chapter 7) vampire bats, impalas, capuchin monkeys, and chimps (Brosnan & de Waal, 2002). For example, if baboon A grooms baboon B, baboon B is more likely to share food later with baboon A. In humans, feeling obligated to return favors seems to be pretty automatic. We even feel the need to reciprocate and return favors to people we don’t like (Regan, 1971). Humans are also generous to others when the likelihood that they will reciprocate is low (Delton et al., 2011) and even without a tit-for-tat agreement that they will receive help in the future (de Waal, 1996). For example, it is unlikely that Joe Delaney gave his life in his efforts to save three drowning boys because he thought they might somehow pay him back—he simply saw children in need and wanted to help.

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Biological Bases of Helping

If helpfulness does indeed have a genetic basis, there should be some evidence of gene-based variability in this trait. Consistent with this idea, studies have found evidence of the heritability of prosocial tendencies (Knafo & Plomin, 2006). When pairs of seven-year-old twins were rated by parents for prosocial behavior, identical twins showed correlations greater than .60, whereas fraternal twins showed correlations lower than .40. Keep in mind that identical twins share 100% of their genes and that fraternal twins share only about 50%. But both types of twins are typically raised together in the same household by the same parents and go to the same school. So when behavioral geneticists observe higher correlations among identical (monozygotic) twins than among fraternal (dizygotic twins), they conclude that the trait has some genetic component. In this case, the heritability of prosocial tendencies was estimated to be 62% for the seven-year-olds in this study. In other words, 62% in the variation in prosocial behaviors among the children in this study was attributed to genetic factors. This is suggestive evidence, but it is not definitive, because identical twins’ similar levels of helpfulness could result from their being treated especially similarly by others because their other personality and physical attributes are so similar.

Other evidence suggestive of a biological basis for helpfulness can be found in the study of other social animals. Chimpanzees will help out their human caretaker by getting something that she cannot reach (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). They will also share food with other chimps and will help other chimps who have helped them in the past or with whom they have formed friendships or alliances (Brosnan & de Waal, 2002). Such examples of helping are not confined to primates. Scientists monitoring a group of killer whales near Patagonia observed that when an elderly female had damaged her jaw and could not eat properly, she was fed and kept alive by her companions (Mountain, 2012). Similarly, in an experiment, rats who first shared a cage with another rat for a couple of weeks worked to free their cage mate when they found he was trapped behind a closed door (Bartal et al., 2011). Without any prior learning about how to open the door or any clear reward for doing so, the rats figured out how to free their buddy. If a pile of delicious chocolate chips was placed behind a second closed door, the rats were as likely to free their cage mate as free the chocolate chips. And when both doors had been opened, the two rats tended to share the chocolate. Who knew rats could make such good roommates! Of course, nonhuman animals are occasionally stingy, keeping food for themselves even when another is visibly begging for a snack (Vonk et al., 2008), but a good deal of evidence shows that species other than humans can and do engage in prosocial behavior.

If prosocial behavior is an inherent part of our human nature, then we might see evidence of it at a very young age. In fact, babies have a pretty keen sense of who’s naughty and who’s nice. Infants as young as 3 months prefer others who are helpful rather than hurtful (Hamlin et al., 2007, 2010; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011). If we come into the world ready to evaluate people on the basis of their good or bad behavior, perhaps we come preequipped to carry out good behavior ourselves. Toddlers less than two years old will help an experimenter pick up something she has dropped (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). What’s more, the toddlers did not help simply because they were interested in picking stuff up when it fell. They picked up the fallen item only if it seemed to have been dropped by accident, and not when the experimenter intentionally dropped it. Young kids do not help just anyone but selectively help those who have been helpful in the past (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010). These early examples of helping also might reflect a motive to affiliate with others. Even 18-month-old toddlers are more likely to help when they are primed with affiliation by first seeing two dolls standing together (Over & Carpenter, 2009). Taken together, these examples from an emerging body of research point to an innate prosocial proclivity in our species.

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Humans are no doubt genetically predisposed toward helping, but we also are predisposed to learn and so develop helpful tendencies through the socialization process. Positive parenting practices, for example, predict greater prosocial behavior in children even after controlling for any shared genetic relationship (Knafo & Plomin, 2006). Although genes provide people with some basic inclinations, culture and learning shape when and for whom these inclinations are cued. Indeed, among the most important genetic inheritances we humans share is the enormously flexible capacity for learning and internalizing local morals and social norms (Becker, 1962; Hoffman, 1981). In this way, people’s prosocial behavior is jointly influenced by both genes and environment (Eisenberg & Mussen, 1989; Knafo et al., 2011).

A learning-theory account of prosocial development suggests that people learn to be helpful in a series of stages. At a young age, they learn to be helpful to get things they want. Parents facilitate this mindset with charts that award a child a star every time she shares her toys, says “Please” and “Thank you,” or makes her bed. Later in development, people learn to help because social rewards come from the approval they receive from others. A child might learn that other kids are more likely to play with her when she has helped them in the past. And finally, in stage three, people help because they adhere to internalized values (Bar-Tal, 1976; Cialdini et al., 1981). That means that they are listening to the voice of their moral conscience rather than pursuing material goodies or approval from others. Knowing that even young infants show signs of helping, as we saw earlier, we can conclude that people’s propensity for prosocial behavior comes on line early in development, but these learning stages shape how this propensity is expressed and the types of situations that bring it out.

As cultural animals, people are saturated with information that can cue ways of being and behaving. These include parents, teachers, role models, and media. Some prosocial instruction is fairly explicit. At a young age, children are taught to share with siblings and playmates. They might be given chores to do around the house to teach them ways that they can help the family. In an effort to extend the prosocial orientation beyond close family and friends, many elementary and secondary schools offer programs to encourage community service or fund-raising efforts for local and international charities. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law the National Community Service Act, a program that provides students the opportunity to receive academic credit, money toward college tuition, and/or job training for the time they spend volunteering with community agencies (Lee, 1993).

Just as children learn specific behaviors and acts of charity from the people around them, so too do these people influence children’s emotional responses to those in need. For example, parents who display more emotional warmth themselves tend to have children who are better able to empathize with others and who are seen by others as more socially competent (Zhou et al., 2002). These relationships are present even after researchers controlled for the empathy these children displayed during a study two years previously, underscoring the causal role that parents might be playing. Children also can learn to be more prosocial if they are encouraged to integrate helpfulness into their personal identities. In one study, second graders who were labeled helpful when they shared were more likely to be helpful later than those who shared but weren’t labeled helpful (Eisenberg et al., 1987).

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People also learn prosocial tendencies from the media. Consider video games. In chapter 12 we saw that violent video games can encourage aggressive responses. Yet playing video games that reward prosocial behaviors increases prosocial behavior (Greitemeyer, 2011a). When study participants first played Lemmings, a video game whose primary goal is to keep your little group of lemmings alive, they were later almost three times more likely to help the experimenter pick up spilled pencils than were those who had played Tetris. Of course, picking up pencils poses no great sacrifice. But what about a more dangerous situation? When the experimenters constructed a scenario in which the participants witnessed the female experimenter being harassed by her hostile ex-boyfriend, 56% of those who had just played the prosocial video game City Crisis intervened to help her, compared with only 22% who had played Tetris (Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2010). In these cases, the prosocial video games primed prosocial thoughts and behavioral scripts, which remained accessible in people’s minds and influenced their behavior when they interacted with others later on. If only the sales of prosocial videogames were higher than those of their more violent counterparts.