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Why scarcity can both increase and decrease prosocial behaviour: A review and theoretical framework for the complex
Claudia Civai1, Christian T Elbaek2, Valerio Capraro3
1City St George's, University of London, United Kingdom.
Current Opinion in Psychology
|October 23, 2024
Summary
Scarcity shifts attention and increases cognitive load, influencing social behavior through heuristic thinking. Individual and contextual factors moderate these effects, impacting outcomes like parochialism.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Behavioral Economics
- Sociology
Background:
- Mixed findings exist regarding scarcity's impact on social behavior.
- Recent scholarship across disciplines explores this phenomenon.
- A need exists to synthesize existing literature and provide a coherent framework.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review and synthesize recent literature on scarcity and social behavior.
- To propose a novel framework for understanding scarcity's effects.
- To apply the framework to explain scarcity's influence on parochialism.
Main Methods:
- Systematic literature review of recent studies on scarcity and social behavior.
- Development of a theoretical framework integrating attentional and cognitive load mechanisms.
- Application of the framework to specific social behaviors, such as parochialism.
Main Results:
- Scarcity induces an attentional shift towards the scarce resource.
- Scarcity increases cognitive load, promoting heuristic thinking.
- Social behavior is modulated by transient and enduring individual and contextual factors.
Conclusions:
- The proposed framework offers a unified explanation for how scarcity affects social behavior.
- Scarcity's influence on parochialism is explained through the framework's mechanisms.
- Caution is advised against the uncritical use of scarcity salience for behavioral modification.
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