How Do Stress and Social Closeness Impact Prosocial Behavior?
Abstract
Abstract. Factors such as time pressure and psychosocial stress may increase or decrease prosocial behavior depending on a number of factors. One factor that consistently positively impacts prosocial behavior is relationship status: Prosocial behavior is more likely toward kin than toward strangers. The interactions among stress, kin relationships, and prosocial behavior were examined in two separate experiments. In Study 1, 79 university students were asked to decide how much money to donate to family members, friends, or strangers, either under time pressure or with no time constraints. Participants donated more to close kin and friends than to strangers, but time pressure did not increase prosocial behavior. In Study 2, 94 university students completed the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups (TSST-G) or a control task, followed by a similar donation task as used in Study 1. Participants donated more to close kin and friends than to strangers, but stress did not influence donation amounts. These results do not support the hypothesis that stress due to time pressure or psychosocial factors increases prosocial behavior.
References
(2010). Empathy-induced altruistic motivation. In M. MikulinerP. Shaver (Eds.), Prosocial motives, emotions and behavior: The better angels of our nature (pp. 15–34). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
(2017). Acute stress alters individual risk taking in a time‐dependent manner and leads to anti‐social risk. European Journal of Neuroscience, 45, 877–885. 10.1111/ejn.13395
(2016). Cortisol modulates men’s affiliative responses to acute social stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 63, 1–9. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.09.004
(2017). Registered replication report: Rand, Greene, and Nowak (2012). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 527–542.
(1990). Group selection among alternative evolutionarily stable strategies. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 145, 331–342. 10.1016/s0022-5193(05)80113-4
(2012). The empathic, physiological resonance of stress. Social Neuroscience, 7, 191–201. 10.1080/17470919.2011.588723
(2014). Stress leads to prosocial action in immediate need situations. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 5. 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00005
(1994). Some neo-Darwinian decision rules for altruism: Weighing cues for inclusive fitness as a function of the biological importance of the decision. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 773. 10.1037/0022-3514.67.5.773
(2004). Acute stressors and cortisol responses: A theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 355–391. 10.1037/0033-2909.130.3.355
(1993). Judgment and decision making under time pressure. In O. SvensonA. J. Maul (Eds.), Time pressure and stress in human judgment and decision making. New York, NY: Plenum.
(2007). How reinforcer type affects choice in economic games. Behavioural Processes, 75, 107–114. 10.1016/j.beproc.2007.02.001
(2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavioral Research Methods, 39, 175–191. 10.3758/bf03193146
(2015). The effects of social context and acute stress on decision making under uncertainty. Psychological Science, 26, 1918–1926. 10.1177/0956797615605807
(2007). Human affection exchange: XIII. Affectionate communication accelerates neuroendocrine stress recovery. Health Communication, 22, 123–132. 10.1080/10410230701454015
(2006). Kin selection is the key to altruism. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 21, 57–60. 10.1016/j.tree.2005.11.020
(2015). The Trier Social Stress Test as a paradigm to study how people respond to threat in social interactions. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 14. 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00014
(2005). Psychological determinants of the cortisol stress response: The role of anticipatory cognitive appraisal. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 30, 599–610. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2005.02.001
(2002). Sex differences in behavioral and hormonal response to social threat: Commentary on Taylor et al. (2000). Psychological Review, 109, 745–750. 10.1037/0033-295x.109.4.745
(2007). Salivary α‐amylase in biobehavioral research. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1098, 122–144. 10.1196/annals.1384.008
(1959). On methods in the analysis of profile data. Psychometrika, 24, 95–112. 10.1007/bf02289823
(1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16. 10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4
(2009). Neuroendocrine and psychometric evaluation of a placebo version of the “Trier Social Stress Test”. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34, 1075–1086. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2009.02.008
(2016). Prosociality. Current Biology, 26, R748–R752.
(2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. GilovichD. GriffinD. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 47–81). New York: Cambridge University Press.
(1999). Impact of gender, menstrual cycle phase, and oral contraceptives on the activity of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Psychosomatic Medicine, 61, 154–162. 10.1097/00006842-199903000-00006
(1993). The ‘Trier Social Stress Test’–a tool for investigating psychobiological stress responses in a laboratory setting. Neuropsychobiology, 28, 76–81. 10.1159/000119004
(2005). Sex differences in HPA axis responses to stress: A review. Biological Psychology, 69, 113–132. 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2004.11.009
(2018). Dissociable roles of glucocorticoid and noradrenergic activation on social discounting. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 90, 22–28.
(2019). The Caring Continuum: Evolved hormonal and proximal mechanisms explain prosocial and antisocial extremes. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 347–371. 10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103010
(2009). Salivary alpha-amylase as a non-invasive biomarker for the sympathetic nervous system: Current state of research. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34, 486–496. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2009.01.014
(2017). Sex differences in the effects of psychosocial stress on cooperative and prosocial behavior: Evidence for ‘flight or fight’ in males and ‘tend and befriend’ in females. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 3, 171–183. 10.1007/s40750-017-0062-3
(2015). Inequality and visibility of wealth in experimental social networks. Nature, 526, 426–429. 10.1038/nature15392
(2005). Evolution of indirect reciprocity. Nature, 437, 1291–1298. 10.1038/nature04131
(2019). To trust, or not to trust? Individual differences in physiological reactivity predict trust under acute stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 100, 75–84. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.09.019
(2013). The origins of altruism in offspring care. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 1305–1341. 10.1037/a0031755
(2016). Cooperation, fast and slow: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of social heuristics and self-interested deliberation. Psychological Science, 27, 1192–1206. 10.1177/0956797616654455
(2012). Spontaneous giving and calculated greed. Nature, 489, 427–430. 10.1038/nature11467
(2013). Human cooperation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 413–425. 10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.003
(2014). Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation. Nature Communications, 5, 1–12. 10.1038/ncomms4677
(2009). Stress prompts habit behavior in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 7191–7198. 10.1523/jneurosci.0979-09.2009
(2011). Does stress alter everyday moral decision-making? Psychoneuroendocrinology, 36, 210–219. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2010.07.010
(2007). Altruism among kin vs. nonkin: Effects of cost of help and reciprocal exchange. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 193–198. 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.01.002
(1993). Framing and time pressure in decision making. In O. SvensonA. J. Maule (Eds.), Time pressure and stress in human judgment and decision making (pp. 133–144). New York, NY: Plenum Press.
(2006). Tend and befriend biobehavioral bases of affiliation under stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 273–277. 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00451.x
(2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107, 411. 10.1037/0033-295x.107.3.411
(2006). Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 10952–10955. 10.1073/pnas.0602530103
(1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57. 10.1086/406755
(2019). Effects of acute stress on social behavior in women. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 99, 137–144. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.08.031
(2012). The social dimension of stress reactivity acute stress increases prosocial behavior in humans. Psychological Science, 23, 651–660. 10.1177/0956797611431576
(2011). The Trier Social Stress Test for Groups (TSST-G): A new research tool for controlled simultaneous social stress exposure in a group format. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 36, 514–522. 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2010.08.004
(1975). A theory of group selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 72, 143–146. 10.1073/pnas.72.1.143
(2018). Differential effects of real versus hypothetical monetary reward magnitude on risk-taking behavior and brain activity. Scientific Reports, 8, 1–9. 10.1038/s41598-018-21820-0
(2013). Intuitive prosociality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 466–470. 10.1177/0963721413492764
(2019). How cortisol reactivity influences prosocial decision-making: The moderating role of sex and empathic concern. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 415. 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00415
