Searching for Prosociality in Qualitative Data: Comparing Manual, Closed-Vocabulary, and Open-Vocabulary Methods

Although most people present themselves as possessing prosocial traits, people differ in the extent to which they actually act prosocially in everyday life. Qualitative data that were not ostensibly collected to measure prosociality might contain information about prosocial dispositions that is not distorted by self–presentation concerns. This paper seeks to characterise charitable donors from qualitative data. We compared a manual approach of extracting predictors from participants’ self–described personal strivings to two automated approaches: A summation of words predefined as prosocial and a support vector machine classifier. Although variables extracted by the support vector machine predicted donation behaviour well in the training sample ( N = 984), virtually, no variables from any method significantly predicted donations in a holdout sample ( N = 496). Raters’ attempts to predict donations to charity based on reading participants’ personal strivings were also unsuccessful. However, raters’ predictions were associated with past charitable involvement. In sum, predictors derived from personal strivings did not robustly explain variation in charitable behaviour, but personal strivings may nevertheless contain some information about trait prosociality. The sparseness of personal strivings data, rather than the irrelevance of open–ended text or individual differences in goal pursuit, likely explains their limited value in predicting prosocial behaviour. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psycholog

When and why do third parties punish outside of the lab? A cross-cultural recall study

Punishment can reform uncooperative behavior and hence could have contributed to humans&rsquo; ability to live in large-scale societies. Punishment by unaffected third parties has received extensive scientific scrutiny because third parties punish transgressors in laboratory experiments on behalf of strangers that they will never interact with again. Often overlooked in this research are interactions involving people who are not strangers, which constitute many interactions beyond the laboratory. Across three samples in two countries (United States and Japan; N = 1,294), we found that third parties&rsquo; anger at transgressors, and their intervention and punishment on behalf of victims, varied in real-life conflicts as a function of how much third parties valued the welfare of the disputants. Punishment was rare (1&ndash;2%) when third parties did not value the welfare of the victim, suggesting that previous economic game results have overestimated third parties&rsquo; willingness to punish transgressors on behalf of strangers.</p

Can Studies of Trait Altruism be Trusted?

Studies using the self-report altruism scale (SRA) to measure trait altruism have found that altruism is uncorrelated with antisocial motives and positively correlated with being female and number of sex partners. However, it is unknown whether the SRA scale meets basic psychometric standards, such as unidimensionality. The act-frequency format of the SRA likely undermines its ability to isolate any one motive for behaving prosocially. In a pilot study (N =276), factor analysis indicated that the SRA contains dimensions related to the performance of favors (Factor 1), charitable giving (Factor 2), and politeness among strangers (Factor 3). Factor 2 predicted laboratory charitable giving, possibly due to having items related to charity. The present study (N = 814) replicated the three-factor structure of the SRA, with the majority of items loading on Factor 1. Factor 1 was negatively associated with criterion measures of altruism, and was the only factor that positively correlated with antisocial motives and number of sex partners. Factors 2 and 3, as well as other self-report measures of altruism, generally had the exact opposite correlates of Factor 1. Overall, treating the SRA as unidimensional has obscured trait altruism’s relationships to other constructs

Does Cooperation in the Laboratory Reflect the Operation of a Broad Trait?

The Dictator Game, a face valid measure of altruism, and the Trust Game, a face valid measure of trust and trustworthiness, are among the most widely used behavioural measures in human cooperation research. Researchers have observed considerable covariation among these and other economic games, leading them to assert that there exists a general human propensity to cooperate that varies in strength across individuals and manifests itself across a variety of social settings. To formalize this hypothesis, we created an S‐1 bifactor model using 276 participants' Dictator Game and Trust Game decisions. The general factor had significant, moderate associations with self‐reported and peer‐reported altruism, trust, and trustworthiness. Thus, the positive covariation among economic games is not reducible to the games' shared situational features. Two hundred participants returned for a second session. The general factor based on Dictator Game and Trust Game decisions from this session did not significantly predict self‐reported and peer‐reported cooperation, suggesting that experience with economic games causes them to measure different traits from those that are reflected in self‐assessments and peer‐assessments of cooperativeness. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psycholog