The core tendencies underlying prosocial behavior: Testing a person-situation framework

According to a recently proposed theoretical framework, different personality traits should explain pro-social behavior in different situations. We empirically tested the key proposition of this framework that each of four "core tendencies" (i.e., the shared variance of related traits) specifically predicts pro-social behavior in the presence of a different situational affordance.

We used a large-scale dataset (N = 2479) including measures of various personality traits and six incentivized economic games assessing pro-social behavior in different social situations. Using bifactor modeling, we extracted four latent core tendencies and tested their predictive validity for pro-social behavior.

We found mixed support for the theoretically derived, preregistered hypotheses. The core tendency of beliefs about others' pro-sociality predicted pro-social behavior in both games involving dependence under uncertainty, as expected. Unconditional concern for others' welfare predicted pro-social behavior in only one of two games providing a possibility for exploitation. For conditional concern for others' welfare and self-regulation, in turn, evidence relating them to pro-social behavior in the presence of a possibility for reciprocity and temporal conflict was relatively weak.

Different features of social situations may activate different personality traits to influence pro-social behavior, but more research is needed to fully understand these person-situation interactions.