Feelings of elevation, elicited by witnessing another person perform a good deed, have been hypothesized to motivate a desire to help others. However, despite growing interest in the determinants of prosocial behavior, there is only limited evidence that elevation leads to increases in altruistic behavior. In two experiments, we tested the relationship between elevation and helping behavior. Pr...

Under what conditions do people act dishonestly to help or hurt others? This paper addresses this question by examining the influence of a previously overlooked factor – the beneficiary or victim of dishonest acts. In two experiments, we randomly pair participants and manipulate their wealth levels through an initial lottery. We then observe how inequity between partners influences the likeliho...

Prosocial behavior emerges in the second year of life, yet it is typical for children in this period not to share, comfort, or help. We compared toddlers (18, 30 months) who helped with those who did not help on two tasks (instrumental helping; empathic helping). More than half of children failed to help on one or both tasks. Nonhelpers engaged in more hypothesis testing on the instrumental hel...

BACKGROUND Chronic blood shortages in the U.S. would be alleviated by small increases, in percentage terms, of people donating blood. The current research investigated the effects of subtle changes in charity-seeking messages on the likelihood of people responses to a call for help. We predicted that "avoid losses" messages would lead to more helping behavior than "promote gains" messages would...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To test the impact of patient smoking behavior on family caregiver judgments of responsibility, emotions, empathic responses, and helping behavior. DESIGN Structural equation modeling. SETTING Five oncology outpatient settings in Canada. SAMPLE 304 dyads consisting of patients with lung cancer and their primary caregivers. METHODS Self-report questionnaires, abstracte...

Within-nation cultural variation across regions provides a largely untapped resource for examining crosscultural relations usually studied at the international level. The current study examines the relations of collectivism, helping behavior with strangers, and pace of life across regions of the United States. The study shows that within-nation cultural variation can be used both to (a) cross-v...