Prosocial Behaviour
prosocial behaviour
Prosocial Learning and Motivation across the Lifespan
2024 BACN Early-Career Prize Lecture Many of our decisions affect other people. Our choices can decelerate climate change, stop the spread of infectious diseases, and directly help or harm others. Prosocial behaviours – decisions that help others – could contribute to reducing the impact of these challenges, yet their computational and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. I will present recent work that examines prosocial motivation, how willing we are to incur costs to help others, prosocial learning, how we learn from the outcomes of our choices when they affect other people, and prosocial preferences, our self-reports of helping others. Throughout the talk, I will outline the possible computational and neural bases of these behaviours, and how they may differ from young adulthood to old age.
Social neuroscience studies of racial ingroup bias in empathy
Empathy is supposed to play a functional role in prosocial behavior. However, there has been behavioral evidence that people do not empathize everyone equally. I’ll present studies that show brain imaging evidence for racial ingroup bias in empathy for pain. These studies reveal multiple-level neural mechanisms underlying racial ingroup bias in empathy. I’ll also discuss potential intervention of racial ingroup bias in empathy and its social implications.
Personality Evaluated: What Do Other People Really Think of You?
What do other people really think of you? In this talk, I highlight the unique perspective that other people have on the most consequential aspects of our personalities—how we treat others, our best and worst qualities, and our moral character. First, I compare how people thought they behaved with how they actually behaved in everyday life (based on observer ratings of unobtrusive audio recordings; 217 people, 2,519 observations). I show that when people think they are being kind (vs. rude), others do not necessarily agree. This suggests that people may have blind spots about how well they are treating others in the moment. Next, I compare what 463 people thought their own best and worst traits were with what their friends thought about them. The results reveal that friends are more likely to point out flaws in the prosocial and moral domains (e.g., “inconsiderate”, “selfish”, “manipulative”) than are people themselves. Does this imply that others might want us to be more moral? To find out, I compare what targets (N = 800) want to change about their own personalities with what their close others (N = 958) want to change about them. The results show that people don’t particularly want to be more moral, and their close others don’t want them to be more moral, either. I conclude with future directions on honest feedback as a pathway to self-insight and, ultimately, self-improvement.