Don't forget the group! The importance of social norms and empathy for shaping donation behaviour

Promoting prosocial behavior in an unequal world

Amid a global pandemic and the climate crisis, there is an increasing need to understand how to promote largescale, coordinated action between different groups. Yet certain factors such as inequality can hinder cooperation. We aimed to establish how to orient groups toward a superordinate goal when they have unequal resources. Participants were divided into two 'countries' and asked to assemble LEGO bricks into food (by building pieces in a certain order) to prevent starvation among 'the people'. One 'country' had few LEGO bricks whereas the other had an abundance, and the only way to maximize food creation was for the groups to work together. We assessed the efficacy of three diverse interventions on superordinate behavior and attitudes: compassion meditation training (Study 1), lower inequality (Study 2), and the introduction of a pro-sharing group norm by a confederate (Study 3). Compassion meditation training and altering the degree of inequality between groups did not have a clear effect on collaborative action. Only the introduction of a pro-sharing group norm enhanced sharing behavior, made participants feel more cooperative and reduced fears of being compassionate toward others. Our findings speak to the importance of leadership in promoting coordinated action to address challenges that face the superordinate group.

Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research

Helping behavior are actions aiming at assisting another individual in need or to relieve their distress. The occurrence of this behavior not only depends on automated physiological mechanisms, such as imitation or emotional contagion, that is, the individual's emotion and physiological state matching with others, but also needs motivation to sustain. From a comparative and developmental perspective, we discover that the motivation for helping behavior has a deep foundation both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. For example, empathic concern for others, relieving personal distress and the desire for social contact are universal motivations across rodents, non-human primates and human early childhoods. Therefore, a circle-layered model integrating evidences for motivation for helping behavior from rodent to human early childhood research is proposed: the inner circle contains the emotional-behavioral system and the outer circle contains the affective-cognitive system. The application of this model has significance for both behavioral neuroscience research and cultivating prosocial behavior in human society.

A Virtual Net Locks Me In: How and When Information and Communication Technology Use Intensity Leads to Knowledge Hiding

The research explores a novel phenomenon in which information and communication technology (ICT), which is originally designed for knowledge transferring, may result in employees' knowledge hiding due to increasing use intensity. Specifically, drawing upon the appraisal theory of empathy, we develop a moderated mediation model of empathy linking ICT use intensity and knowledge hiding. The hypothesized model is tested by conducting a scenario-based experimental study (Study 1, N = 194) and a multi-wave field study (Study 2, N = 350). Results show that ICT use intensity is positively related to employees' knowledge hiding through the mediating role of their empathy. Moreover, competitive goal interdependence strengthens the negative relationship between ICT use intensity and employees' empathy, and the indirect positive effect between ICT use intensity and employees' knowledge hiding. Overall, the research answers the questions of how and when ICT use intensity may influence employees' knowledge hiding. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the research findings are discussed.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-022-05245-4.

Trait Empathy Modulates Patterns of Personal and Social Emotions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused profound consequences on people's personal and social feelings worldwide. However, little is known about whether individual differences in empathy, a prosocial trait, may affect the emotional feelings under such threat. To address this, we measured 345 Chinese participants' personal emotions (e.g., active, nervous), social emotions (i.e., fearful and empathetic feelings about various social groups), and their empathy traits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the representational similarity analysis (RSA), we calculated the pattern similarity of personal emotions and found the similarity between the positive and negative emotions was less in the high vs. low empathy groups. In addition, people with high (vs. low) empathy traits were more likely to have fearful and sympathetic feelings about the disease-related people (i.e., depression patients, suspected COVID-19 patients, COVID-19 patients, flu patients, SARS patients, AIDS patients, schizophrenic patients) and showed more pattern dissimilarity in the two social feelings toward the disease-related people. These findings suggest a prominent role of trait empathy in modulating emotions across different domains, strengthening the polarization of personal emotions as well as enlarging social feelings toward a set of stigmatized groups when facing a pandemic threat.

Share Rose, Get Fun: The Influence of Donation on Happiness

There is little literature on the impact of donation on individual wellbeing in China. This study examines individual donations in China to answer the question of whether helping others makes us happier and to provide policy implications for in Chinese context. Based on the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data and using ordered logit and OLS as benchmark models, this study finds that donation can significantly increase individual happiness. After using propensity score matching (PSM) to eliminate the possible impact of self-selection, the above conclusion remains robust. After a sub-sample discussion, it is found that this effect is more pronounced under completely voluntary donation behavior, and is not affected by economic factors, indicating that the happiness effect of donation does not vary significantly depending on the individual's economic status. This study contributes to the literature on donation behavior by examining the impact of donation behavior on donors' subjective happiness in China, and further identifies subjective happiness differences, as between voluntary and involuntary donations, thereby providing theoretical and empirical support for the formulation of policies for the development of donation institutions in China.

Factors Influencing Decision Making About Living Donation Among Medical Students

AIM

This study aimed to assess the factors influencing decision making about living donation among medical students.

METHOD

Three standardized survey questionnaires (the Altruism Questionnaire A-N, the Individual Questionnaire for studying approaches to transplantology, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index) were used among 316 students of nursing and paramedics.

RESULTS

Nearly all the respondents (98%) approve cell transplantation, tissue transplantation, and organ transplantation if obtained from living donors. Of the respondents, 66% would consent to donate bone marrow, and 26% would give their consent only in specific situations. Most respondents reported to be encouraged to donate organs by the ability to help other people (56%), while their refusal would be because of the fear of undergoing medical procedures (13%). Older age and a higher score in the personal distress subscale are correlated with a lack of consent to donate bone marrow for transplantation. In the case of living organ donation, the increase in the scores in the fantasy scale caused a higher chance for consent to living donation, whereas older age was the predictor of lack of consent. Higher scores in the perspective taking subscale were found to be significantly correlated with fear of surgical treatment as the reason for refusing to give one's consent to living donation. The belief that willingness to become a donor shows a person who has a sense of prosocial behavior was influenced by the fantasy and the empathic concern subscales.

CONCLUSIONS

The study group approves cell transplantation, tissue transplantation, and organ transplantation from living donors. These attitudes are determined by empathic behavior.