From student to superhero: Situational primes shape future helping

The present research uses priming techniques to modify commitment to and engagement in future helping behavior. Relative to a control condition, people primed with the exemplar Superman saw themselves as less likely (Studies 1a and 1b), and participants primed with the category superhero saw themselves as more likely (Study 1a), to help in hypothetical situations. Study 2 extended these effects to real-world planned helping behavior, by demonstrating that these primes impacted commitment to future volunteerism. Finally, Study 3 showed that these changes in initial commitment impacted volunteering behavior up to three months after initial exposure. These results demonstrate that fleeting situational primes can impact not only spontaneous behavior, but also future behavior. 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ‘‘Like. . .Superman you will come to save me. . .’’ -Aimee Mann ‘‘Save Me’’ Psychologists have exhaustively researched factors that promote and inhibit altruism, with two primary goals: Understanding the processes which underlie helping, and developing strategies for increasing helping behavior. These investigations have focused both on the stable individual differences that reflect altruistic motives and the subtle situational factors that can impact helping, reflective of a dichotomy in the broader effort of psychologists to document the determinants of human behavior. Although research has suggested that behavior reflects the conscious workings of a complex psychological system (e.g., Ajzen, 1991; Carver & Scheier, 1998), a growing subset of findings has indicated 0022-1031/$ see front matter 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2004.08.003 q The authors thank Kevin Carlsmith, Robyn Leboeuf, Benoı̂t Monin, and Sam Sommers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (L.D. Nelson). that subtle priming techniques can cause behavior without conscious regulation. Such primes have been shown to impact an increasingly diverse set of behaviors, from intellectual performance (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998), conformity (Epley & Gilovich, 1999), and walking speed (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) to one most relevant to the present investigation, spontaneous helping behavior (Garcia, Weaver, Moskowitz, & Darley, 2002; Macrae & Johnston, 1998). Early research on helping focused on the ways in which modest manipulations could lead to dramatic changes in behavior. Darley and Batson (1973), for example, showed that merely telling people that they were running late reduced the likelihood that they would stop to help someone slumped in a doorway. Macrae and Johnston (1998) showed that an even more subtle manipulation could impact helping behavior, as participants primed with helping-related words were 1 We note that Darley and Batson (1973) used another classic helpful exemplar—the Good Samaritan—and failed to find significant effects. Because participants in this experiment were also exposed to two unhelpful exemplars (the priest and the Levite), it should perhaps not be a surprise that this manipulation was not entirely successful. 424 L.D. Nelson, M.I. Norton / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41 (2005) 423–430 subsequently more likely to help someone pick up spilled pens. While this line of research has focused on the ease with which such spontaneous helping behavior can be manipulated, a parallel line of research has examined a different type of helping behavior—planned, or long-term, helping behavior—with often very different determinants. We chose volunteerism as our instantiation of this kind of helping behavior, a form of helping that has received increased attention in recent years (see Putnam, 2000; Wilson, 2000). Volunteering, unlike the spontaneous helping behaviors examined in many investigations, may require a great deal of time and effort (Omoto & Snyder, 1995). The act of volunteering, moreover, has consequences for long-term behavior: a splitsecond decision to volunteer may lead to weeks, months, or even years of commitment. Research on volunteering has shown a relative insensitivity to situational influences: Because the decision to volunteer involves commitment beyond the immediate future, volunteering has been shown to be best predicted by more stable factors, such as individual differences in prosocial orientation (e.g., Penner & Finkelstein, 1998), and, as is the case with many behaviors, prospective volunteers own past behavior (e.g., Piliavin & Callero, 1991). These two stable factors, individual differences and past behavior, are by their very definition situationally inalterable. Given these constraints, one possible inference is that the subliminal priming procedures shown to influence many types of spontaneous behavior would be unlikely to impact behaviors that are predicted by more stable factors, like volunteering. Though research on volunteerism suggests that situational factors should have little effect, some findings indicate that even stable dispositions can be impacted by priming manipulations. In a prisoner s dilemma paradigm, for example, individuals primed with competitiveness were more likely to compete, but only if they had already shown a predisposition towards competing (Neuberg, 1988). More recent work has further suggested that pro-social and pro-self dispositions are further moderated by individual self-consistency (Smeesters, Warlop, Van Avermaet, Corneille, & Yzerbyt, 2003). Unlike the non-competitive response in a prisoner s dilemma situation, volunteering—due to its positive connotations— may be a domain towards which individuals generally might consider themselves disposed: The vast majority of people, for example, see themselves as more likely than the average person to donate blood (Allison, Messick, & Goethals, 1989). Primes that activate ‘‘helping’’ constructs, therefore, may have the potential to influence behaviors that are generally seen as resistant to the impact of fleeting situational forces. Echoing the behavioral priming research cited above, we used a category and exemplar prime paradigm (e.g., Dijksterhuis et al., 1998) to prime helpfulness, selecting the category ‘‘superheroes’’ and the exemplar ‘‘Superman’’—both highly altruistic constructs—as our target stimuli. Previous research has shown that individuals compare themselves to the standards set by such social stimuli (e.g., Festinger, 1954; Mussweiler, 2003). Typically, these comparison processes result in assimilation in both judgments and behavior (e.g., Bargh et al., 1996; Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998; Kawakami, Dovidio, & Dijksterhuis, 2003), in part because when making comparisons, people first focus on shared features (e.g., Srull & Gaelick, 1983), a focus which frequently leads to assimilation due to activation of this information (Mussweiler, 2003). Although people default to similarity testing— and the assimilation that results—people do engage in dissimilarity testing as well (Mussweiler, 2003). This less common comparison is more likely to occur when comparisons are made with extreme, unambiguous standards (e.g., Dijksterhuis et al., 1998; Herr, 1986; Herr, Sherman, & Fazio, 1983; LeBoeuf & Estes, in press; Lockwood & Kunda, 1997; Stapel, Koomen, & van der Plight, 1997), precisely the kind of standard that a superhuman target such as Superman represents. Thus, we predicted that people would contrast from helpful exemplar primes (Superman), but assimilate to helpful category primes (superheroes) in judgments of themselves, predictions of their behavior, and their actual behavior.