Children's Sensitivity to Ulterior Motives When Evaluating Prosocial Behavior

Children's Motives for Admitting to Prosocial Behavior

There has been extensive research on children's moral evaluation of lying in prosocial situations. Current knowledge regarding the concept of lying has been derived from studies showing that cultural differences exist, whereby non-Western children tend to rate lie telling more positively than Western children do. These findings suggest that there are different views about whether children shoul...

Highlighting relatedness promotes prosocial motives and behavior.

According to self-determination theory, people have three basic psychological needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Of these, the authors reasoned that relatedness need satisfaction is particularly important for promoting prosocial behavior because of the increased sense of connectedness to others that this engenders. In Experiment 1, the authors manipulated relatedness, autonomy, compe...

Better to give and to compete? Prosocial and competitive motives as interactive predictors of citizenship behavior.

Research has returned mixed results concerning the relationship between prosocial motivation and citizenship behavior. Building from research suggesting that mixed motives might explain these equivocal findings, we conducted two field studies examining the interaction between prosocial and competitive motives and two types of citizenship behavior. Prosocial motivation, but not competitive motiv...

The Process of Becoming Suspicious of Ulterior Motives

Stimulating Influenza Vaccination via Prosocial Motives

OBJECTIVE Americans do not vaccinate nearly enough against Influenza (flu) infection, despite severe health and economic burden of influenza. Younger people are disproportionately responsible for transmission, but do not suffer severely from the flu. Thus, to achieve herd immunity, prosocial motivation needs to be a partial driver of vaccination decisions. Past research has not established the ...