Why do people help others and what motivates them to engage in voluntary work? Are the psychological mechanisms that initiate prosocial behavior similar across cultures? In order to find answers for these questions, we give an overview of the prominent approaches to helping, and report findings of studies investigating informal spontaneous help and formal, planned forms of helping. A linchpin o...

Many studies have found that seemingly unconnected behaviors are correlated into behavioral syndromes. These behavioral syndromes may be the consequence of interindividual variation in life-history strategies. Only few studies have investigated the role of behavioral syndromes in cooperatively breeding species, despite the fact that one would expect particular large variation in behavior due to...