Sources and References

Primary readings — Burris, C., & Rempel, J. K. (2012). Morality. In Burris & Rempel (Eds.), Psychology of Good and Evil. University of Waterloo course reader; Davis, M. H. (2015). Empathy and prosocial behavior. In D. A. Schroeder & W. G. Graziano (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior. Oxford University Press; Clark, M. S., Tagaki, A., & Hovanesian, J. (2015). Relational context as a determinant of prosocial behavior. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior; Nolan, J. M., & Schultz, P. W. (2015). Environmental context and prosocial behavior. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior; Tyler, T. R. (2015). Justice and prosocial behavior. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior; Pryor, J. B., & Bos, A. E. R. (2015). Stigma and prosocial behavior. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior; Stukas, A. A., Snyder, M., & Clary, E. G. (2015). Volunteerism and prosocial behavior. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior; Christie, D. J., & Montiel, C. J. (2015). Contributions of psychology to war and peace. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior; Graziano, W. G., Habashi, M. M., & Tobin, R. M. (2015). Personality processes and prosocial behavior. In Schroeder & Graziano (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior.

Supplementary texts — Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon; Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in Humans. Oxford University Press; Singer, P. (2011). The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Princeton University Press (orig. 1981); Bloom, P. (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Ecco Press; Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall; Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House; Bandura, A. (2016). Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. Worth Publishers; Kohlberg, L. (1981). The Philosophy of Moral Development. Harper & Row; Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press; Trivers, R. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35–57; Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I & II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1), 1–52; Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4), 377–383; Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum; Colby, A., & Damon, W. (1992). Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment. Free Press.

Online resources — UW Library electronic reserves; APA PsycINFO; Oxford Handbooks Online.

Chapter 1: What Is Good? Definitions of Morality and Prosocial Behaviour

1.1 The Definitional Challenge

The word “good” is deceptively simple. In everyday speech it carries moral weight (“she is a good person”), evaluative weight (“this is a good policy”), and hedonic weight (“that was a good meal”). In the psychological study of prosocial behaviour and morality, good is a technical term referring primarily to actions, intentions, traits, and social arrangements that benefit others or conform to ethical standards that a community endorses. Yet even within that narrower domain, a cluster of overlapping concepts must be distinguished carefully before any rigorous analysis can proceed.

These concepts overlap: an altruistic act is usually prosocial, often virtuous, and may or may not be demanded by justice. Burris & Rempel’s (2012) analysis of morality asks a deeper question: what distinguishes moral matters from merely prudential matters (self-interest) or conventional matters (social norms)?

1.2 Burris and Rempel on What Makes Something Moral

Burris & Rempel (2012) identify several features that mark an issue as genuinely moral rather than merely conventional or prudential. Moral matters tend to be:

1. Harm-involving — they affect welfare (physical, psychological, or social) of sentient beings.
2. Universalizable — moral judgments carry an implicit claim to hold across persons and contexts (“torturing children is wrong” is not a personal preference but a universal condemnation).
3. Authority-independent — unlike social conventions (e.g., which fork to use), moral rules retain their force even when authority figures do not endorse them. Children understand that hitting another child is wrong even if the teacher says it is allowed; they do not say the same about wearing pyjamas to school.
4. Emotionally compelling — moral violations generate moral emotions (guilt, shame, indignation, disgust) with motivational force.
5. Non-negotiable — people resist bargaining about core moral commitments in ways they do not resist bargaining about preferences.

1.3 Moral Psychology’s Tripartite Framework

Contemporary moral psychology analyses moral functioning along three interacting dimensions:

Moral intuitions are fast, automatic, affect-laden evaluations of actions as right or wrong. They arise without deliberate reasoning and are typically experienced as self-evident (“of course that’s wrong”). They draw on evolutionary heritage, cultural learning, and emotional conditioning.

Moral reasoning is slow, deliberate, argumentative evaluation that considers principles, consequences, duties, and consistency. Kohlberg’s cognitive-developmental theory placed reasoning at the centre of moral development, arguing that mature moral judgment requires principled reasoning about justice.

Moral emotions — guilt, shame, empathy, moral anger, moral elevation, disgust — are the motivational engine of moral behaviour. Without them, knowing what is right does not reliably produce doing what is right.

1.3.1 Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model

Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model (SIM), developed from the late 1990s and synthesized in The Righteous Mind (2012), overturned the Kohlbergian consensus. The SIM proposes:

1. Moral judgments are primarily caused by rapid, automatic intuitions.
2. Moral reasoning typically functions to construct post-hoc justifications for intuition-driven verdicts, not to arrive at verdicts through genuine deliberation.
3. Moral reasoning can causally influence moral judgment — but primarily through social processes: we can change our minds when persuaded by others we trust, not primarily through private deliberation.

1.3.2 Kohlberg’s Stages and Gilligan’s Critique

Lawrence Kohlberg proposed six stages of moral development organized into three levels:

• Pre-conventional (Stages 1–2): moral reasoning based on consequences to the self (punishment avoidance, reward seeking).
• Conventional (Stages 3–4): moral reasoning based on social approval, role obligations, maintaining social order.
• Post-conventional (Stages 5–6): moral reasoning based on social contracts, universal principles of justice and human dignity.

Carol Gilligan (1982) argued that Kohlberg’s framework was androcentric — developed primarily on male samples, using a justice-focused conception of morality that privileged male patterns of moral reasoning. Gilligan’s research on women’s moral development revealed a distinct care ethic — a morality organized around relationships, responsibilities, responsiveness to need, and maintaining connections — rather than abstract justice principles.

1.4 Descriptive vs. Normative Approaches

A fundamental distinction must be maintained throughout this course:

The major normative frameworks and their psychological counterparts are:

1.5 Moral Foundations Theory

Graham, Haidt, Koleva and colleagues developed Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as a descriptive framework for the psychological building blocks of moral systems across cultures:

Political liberals tend to weight care and fairness most heavily; political conservatives use all six foundations more equally. This MFT account helps explain cross-cultural and cross-political variation in moral intuitions.

1.6 The Expanding Moral Circle

Peter Singer’s concept of the expanding moral circle describes the historical process by which the scope of moral concern has progressively broadened — from the immediate family and tribe to the village, nation, all of humanity, distant future generations, and non-human animals. Each expansion required overcoming psychological tendencies toward parochialism (favouring the in-group) through moral reasoning and perspective-taking.

Chapter 2: Why Is Good (Part 1)? The Empathy Foundation

2.1 Empathy as a Psychological Construct

Empathy is one of the most studied constructs in prosocial psychology, yet its definition is contested. The term conflates at least three distinguishable processes, which Davis (2015) systematically disentangles using a dispositional approach — treating empathy as a stable individual difference variable.

2.2 Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index

Mark Davis developed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) as a multidimensional dispositional measure of empathy with four subscales:

1. Perspective Taking (PT) — cognitive empathy subscale; items like “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.”
2. Fantasy (FS) — tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into fictional characters; items like “I really get involved with the feelings of the characters in a novel.”
3. Empathic Concern (EC) — dispositional tendency toward other-oriented emotional responses; items like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”
4. Personal Distress (PD) — dispositional tendency toward self-oriented emotional responses to others’ distress; items like “I tend to lose control during emergencies.”

The IRI is the most widely used empathy measure in prosocial research precisely because it captures the multidimensionality of the construct. Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking are the subscales most consistently associated with prosocial behaviour; Personal Distress can interfere with helping.

2.3 The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

C. Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis (1991) is the most influential theory of altruistic motivation in social psychology:

The hypothesis stands in contrast to three classes of egoistic alternatives:

• Aversive arousal reduction: We help to reduce our own distress (personal distress motive), not for the other’s sake.
• Empathy-specific punishment avoidance: We help to avoid self-blame and social censure that would follow failing to help when empathically aroused.
• Empathy-specific reward seeking: We help to gain self-praise and positive affect (“warm glow”) that follows acting on empathic concern.

2.3.1 The Experimental Paradigm

Batson’s research program used a 2 × 2 design crossing empathy induction (high vs. low empathic concern induced by instructions to “imagine how the person feels” vs. “remain objective”) with ease of escape (easy vs. difficult to avoid continued exposure to the victim’s plight):

Batson and colleagues conducted dozens of such experiments testing egoistic alternatives one by one, and the empathy-altruism hypothesis survived each challenge. Though critics debate whether pure altruism can be definitively demonstrated, Batson’s research program fundamentally changed how social psychologists think about prosocial motivation.

2.4 The Neural Basis of Empathy

The discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys (Rizzolatti and colleagues) provided a potential neural substrate for emotional contagion and simulation-based mindreading. Mirror neurons fire both when a monkey performs an action and when it observes another performing the same action — the brain simulates observed behaviour.

In humans, analogous mirror neuron systems have been identified using neuroimaging in regions including the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule. Critically, regions associated with pain processing (anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex) activate both when one experiences pain and when one observes another in pain — suggesting that empathic resonance literally involves simulating the other’s experience in one’s own neural pain circuitry.

2.5 The Dark Side of Empathy

Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy (2016) mounts a provocative critique that has influenced contemporary moral psychology. Bloom argues that empathy — specifically affective empathy — is a poor guide to moral action because it is:

• Biased toward identifiable, proximate, similar others: We feel more empathy for one identified victim with a name and face than for statistical thousands; for a cute child than an elderly person; for in-group members than out-group members.
• Innumerate: Empathy cannot be calibrated to scale — it does not discriminate between 10 and 10,000 victims. The identified victim effect (Slovic) illustrates this: giving declines as the number of victims increases from one to two to several.
• Exhausting: Sustained empathic engagement in caring professions (nursing, social work, palliative care) leads to empathy fatigue, vicarious trauma, and burnout.
• Parochially amplifying: In conflict situations, empathy for one’s own group can increase hostility toward the opposing group (as each side emotionally resonates with its own suffering).

Research by Tania Singer and colleagues found that compassion training (loving-kindness meditation) increased helping and prosocial motivation without producing the burnout associated with empathy training — suggesting that compassion, not raw empathic resonance, may be the more sustainable basis for doing good.

2.6 Hoffman’s Developmental Theory

Martin Hoffman’s developmental theory of empathic morality traces how empathic capacity grows from infancy through adulthood and becomes integrated with moral principles:

1. Global empathy (infancy): Distress contagion — a newborn cries when hearing other newborns cry.
2. Egocentric empathy (early toddlerhood): Child feels another’s distress but responds with own comfort-seeking strategies.
3. Quasi-egocentric empathy (late toddlerhood): Child recognizes the other as distinct and attempts to help, though still guided by own preferences.
4. Veridical empathy (middle childhood): Child accurately represents the other’s inner states and responds to the other’s actual needs.
5. Empathy for another’s life condition (adolescence): Child can feel empathy not just for immediate distress but for the other’s general life circumstances — chronic poverty, marginalization, long-term loss.

Hoffman argues that moral principles (“one ought to help people in need”) become moralized — acquire emotional force — by being repeatedly associated with empathic experience. Principles learned cognitively remain abstract; principles learned through empathic engagement become motivationally potent.

Chapter 3: Why Is Good (Part 2)? Evolutionary and Relational Origins

3.1 Clark et al.’s Relational Context Framework

Clark, Tagaki, and Hovanesian (2015) argue that a complete psychology of prosocial behaviour cannot treat helping as a context-free phenomenon. The same act of assistance carries different social meanings and has different psychological causes depending on the type of relationship between helper and recipient.

The fundamental distinction, developed by Margaret Clark and Judson Mills across decades of research, is between:

This framework has important implications for prosocial behaviour research: lab studies of helping with strangers (exchange context) may not generalize to helping in close relationships (communal context), and vice versa.

3.2 Evolutionary Foundations: Kin Selection

William D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection provides the most mathematically rigorous evolutionary account of altruism. Hamilton’s rule states that an altruistic act will be selected for when:

where \( r \) is the coefficient of genetic relatedness between actor and recipient, \( b \) is the fitness benefit to the recipient, and \( c \) is the fitness cost to the actor.

Kin selection explains the universal human (and animal) tendency toward nepotism — preferential treatment of relatives — and why family members cooperate even under conditions of conflict.

3.3 Evolutionary Foundations: Reciprocal Altruism

Robert Trivers (1971) introduced reciprocal altruism to explain cooperation among non-kin:

The game-theoretic model underlying reciprocal altruism is the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Robert Axelrod’s computer tournaments demonstrated that Tit-for-Tat — a strategy that cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the partner did on the previous move — is highly robust in populations playing the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Cheater detection is central to reciprocal altruism. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby’s research on social contract reasoning (Wason Selection Task variants) found that people are dramatically better at detecting violations of social contracts (“if you take the benefit, you must pay the cost”) than logically equivalent rules in non-social domains — suggesting a domain-specific cognitive module for detecting cheaters in exchange relationships.

3.4 Indirect Reciprocity and Reputation

Indirect reciprocity (Alexander 1987; Nowak & Sigmund 1998) extends reciprocal altruism beyond dyadic exchange: I help you, not because you will help me back directly, but because others observe me help you, and my reputation for being a helper increases the probability that third parties will help me.

Reputation-based cooperation is supported empirically: people help more generously when they believe they are being observed (even by symbolic representations of eyes — the “watching eyes” effect); gossip (verbal reputation transmission) stabilizes cooperation by spreading information about cooperators and defectors; publicizing prosocial acts (charitable giving leaderboards) increases donations.

3.5 Group Selection and Multi-level Selection

The group selection debate — whether natural selection operates at the level of groups as well as individuals and genes — remains controversial in evolutionary biology. The traditional objection is that within-group selection always favours selfish individuals over altruists, so group selection (which favours groups with more altruists) can only overcome this if inter-group competition is extremely intense and groups are relatively isolated.

David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson’s multi-level selection framework rehabilitates group selection, arguing that human evolution included strong inter-group competition (warfare, resource competition) that selected for psychology supporting within-group solidarity, self-sacrifice for group members, and hostility to outgroups.

3.6 Cultural Evolution of Prosociality

Cultural evolution — the selection, transmission, and modification of cultural practices, norms, and institutions — has extended human prosocial cooperation far beyond what biological evolution alone can explain.

Key mechanisms:

• Institutions: Legal systems, religious organizations, markets, and states solve cooperation problems by providing enforcement, reputation systems, and shared norms.
• Religion: Joseph Henrich and colleagues argue that belief in moralistic, punishing gods solves the free-rider problem in large groups by making prosocial behaviour costly to defect on (divine surveillance). Cross-cultural data supports the prediction that beliefs in monitoring, judgmental gods co-evolved with large-scale cooperative societies.
• Norms: Internalized norms reduce the reliance on external enforcement; people who violate prosocial norms feel guilt and shame even when no one else is watching.

3.7 Social Baseline Theory

James Coan and colleagues’ social baseline theory proposes that human neurobiology evolved assuming the presence of social support as the default environmental condition:

Neuroimaging studies show that holding a spouse’s hand reduces activity in neural threat-response circuitry (anterior insula, anterior cingulate) when anticipating a shock. The mere presence of familiar others reduces the cognitive and metabolic cost of threat regulation. This implies that social embeddedness is constitutive of optimal human functioning — not an optional add-on.

3.8 Attachment Theory as Developmental Foundation

John Bowlby’s attachment theory provides the developmental account of how prosocial motivation is organized in early life:

• The attachment system (proximity-seeking to a caregiver under threat) is activated by distress and deactivated by comfort.
• The secure base function enables exploration and engagement with the social world when threats are absent.
• The caregiving system — the complement of attachment — motivates adult caregiving of dependent others (children, partners, those in distress).

Mary Ainsworth’s strange situation research identified individual differences in attachment security that predict downstream prosocial behaviour: securely attached children and adults show more empathic concern, more effective helping, and more cooperative behaviour than insecurely attached individuals, particularly those with avoidant attachment (who inhibit awareness of others’ distress) or anxious attachment (who are overwhelmed by personal distress).

Chapter 4: Where Is Good? Environmental and Contextual Influences

4.1 Situationism and Prosocial Behaviour

Nolan & Schultz (2015) situate prosocial behaviour within the broader tradition of social psychology’s situationist insight: behaviour is profoundly shaped by contextual factors that often escape conscious awareness. The same individual who is generous in one context may be unhelpful in another — not because their character has changed, but because situational features have changed the calculus of whether and how to help.

4.2 The Bystander Effect

The foundational situationist finding in prosocial behaviour research is the bystander effect, demonstrated by Bibb Latané and John Darley following the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 (whose assault was widely reported as witnessed by 38 neighbours who did not call the police — though this figure was later challenged).

Latané and Darley identified two cognitive-social mechanisms:

4.2.1 Overcoming the Bystander Effect

Research identifies several situational interventions that reliably increase emergency helping:

• Reducing ambiguity: Labeling the situation explicitly as an emergency (“I’m having a heart attack!”) eliminates pluralistic ignorance.
• Eliminating diffusion: Directing a specific individual (“You in the blue shirt — call 911”) removes diffusion of responsibility.
• Increasing victim identification: Named, identified victims evoke more helping than anonymous ones.
• Training: People who have received bystander intervention training are substantially more likely to intervene across a range of situations.

4.3 Social Norms and the Normative Approach

Nolan, Schultz, Cialdini and colleagues developed an influential programme of research on descriptive and injunctive norms as determinants of prosocial behaviour:

The hotel towel study (Goldstein, Cialdini & Griskevicius, 2008) is a canonical field experiment: guests told “the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels” were significantly more likely to reuse towels than guests given a standard environmental appeal. Descriptive norms work through social comparison and conformity processes.

4.4 Nudge Theory and Choice Architecture

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s nudge theory proposes that prosocial behaviour can be substantially increased by redesigning choice environments (choice architecture) without changing incentives or information:

• Default options: Making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in dramatically increases donation rates. Countries with presumed consent (opt-out) systems have donation rates approaching 90%; opt-in systems average around 15–30%.
• Salience and accessibility: Placing healthy food at eye level in cafeterias increases selection; placing charitable giving prompts at point-of-sale increases donations.
• Commitment devices: Allowing people to pre-commit to prosocial behaviour (future giving) when their future-self is considered leverages hyperbolic discounting.

4.5 Physical Environment and Moral Cleanliness

Research on the physical environment as a determinant of prosocial behaviour reveals surprising connections between literal and metaphorical purity:

• Schnall et al.’s cleanliness experiments: Participants primed with cleanliness (by washing their hands, or in a clean-smelling environment) made less harsh moral judgments of others’ transgressions, suggesting that clean environments reduce the salience of moral contamination concerns.
• The Macbeth effect (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006): After recalling an unethical act, participants were more likely to choose a cleaning product over a non-cleaning product, and physical cleansing (washing hands) reduced subsequent guilt and the motivation to engage in compensatory prosocial behaviour — as if the physical act of washing discharged the moral debt.
• Broken windows theory: Environmental signals of disorder (broken windows, litter, graffiti) increase antisocial behaviour by signaling that social norms are not enforced. Field experiments by Kees Keizer and colleagues confirmed that environments with norm violations (litter, graffiti) significantly increased littering and stealing by passersby.

4.6 Zeitgeist and Historical Context

Prosocial behaviour is not only individual and situational — it is also historical. The zeitgeist (spirit of the times) can transform baseline levels of prosocial behaviour across entire societies:

• Wartime solidarity: World War II produced documented increases in spontaneous mutual aid, cooperative behaviour, and charitable giving within nations under threat.
• Social movements: Civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements create normative environments in which previously invisible injustices become morally salient and previously passive individuals are recruited into prosocial action.
• Trust and social capital: Robert Putnam’s research on social capital documents the relationship between civic engagement, institutional trust, and prosocial behaviour at the community level.

Chapter 5: When Is Good? Justice, Priorities, and the Moral Self

5.1 Tyler’s Procedural Justice Framework

Tom Tyler’s (2015) contribution to the psychology of prosocial behaviour concerns a foundational question: when do people comply with rules, cooperate with authorities, and treat others justly — and why? The traditional answer from deterrence theory is that people comply with rules when the costs (punishment) outweigh the benefits of violation. Tyler’s research programme systematically dismantles this answer.

5.1.1 Types of Justice

5.1.2 The Procedural Justice Primacy Finding

Tyler’s central finding, replicated across studies of legal compliance, police legitimacy, tax compliance, and organizational behaviour, is that procedural justice judgments are more important predictors of compliance and cooperation than distributive justice judgments:

5.1.3 The Group Value Model

Lind and Tyler’s group value model (later developed as the relational model of authority) explains why procedural justice matters so much:

This insight connects procedural justice to the broader psychology of social identity and belonging: unfair treatment is experienced not merely as an instrumental loss but as a symbolic rejection from the group.

5.2 Moral Inclusion and Exclusion

Susan Opotow’s concept of moral exclusion addresses the boundary conditions of moral concern:

Psychological mechanisms of moral exclusion include:

• Dehumanization: Representing the out-group as subhuman (vermin, animals, parasites) — documented in rhetoric preceding genocides.
• Euphemistic labeling: Using abstract, sanitized language for harmful acts (“collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation,” “ethnic cleansing”) reduces inhibitions.
• Diffusion of responsibility: In institutional settings, harm is distributed across so many actors that no individual feels personally responsible.
• Victim derogation: Attributing blame to the victim (“they brought it on themselves”) to maintain belief in a just world.

5.3 The Just World Hypothesis

Melvin Lerner’s just world hypothesis (1980) proposes that people have a deep need to believe that the world is fundamentally fair — that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

BJW is an adaptive delusion: it motivates long-term planning and investment (if I work hard, I will be rewarded), sustains hope, and facilitates engagement with the social world. But it has a catastrophic moral shadow: it systematically undermines compassion for victims of illness, poverty, crime, and discrimination by generating the attribution that they must have done something to deserve their fate.

5.4 Moral Licensing and Moral Self-Regulation

A counterintuitive phenomenon that limits prosocial behaviour is moral licensing:

Experiments show:

• People who recalled a past moral act were subsequently less likely to donate to charity and more likely to administer electric shocks to another person.
• People who made an environmentally friendly choice subsequently made less environmentally friendly choices.
• People who voted for a Black candidate subsequently expressed more racially biased attitudes.

Moral self-regulation operates through the self-concept: people are motivated to maintain a self-image as a moral person, and this motivation both produces moral behaviour (to maintain the image) and can produce compensatory immoral behaviour (when the image is already secured). Aquino and Reed’s moral identity research shows that people for whom moral traits are central to self-concept show less moral licensing — their moral motivation is more stable across situations.

5.5 Moral Hypocrisy

Moral hypocrisy (Batson et al.) refers to the motivation to appear moral while avoiding the costs of actually being moral:

In Batson’s experiments, participants were given an opportunity to assign themselves or another person to a task — with the implicit understanding that the fair thing was to flip a coin. Participants who could assign themselves first gave themselves the desirable task the majority of the time; participants who were asked to first state publicly whether the coin flip was the fair procedure overwhelmingly said yes — and then still assigned themselves the desirable task without flipping. When the coin was present, most participants flipped it — but then assigned themselves regardless of the outcome, selectively attending to favourable results.

Chapter 6: When Is Good? Stigma and the Limits of Prosocial Behaviour

6.1 Pryor and Bos on Stigma

Pryor & Bos (2015) examine stigma as a critical limit condition on prosocial behaviour. Stigmatized individuals are systematically excluded from the networks of mutual aid, moral concern, and institutional support that ordinary prosocial behaviour provides.

Contemporary stigma researchers organize stigmatized attributes along several dimensions that predict the nature and severity of stigma:

6.2 Goffman’s Discreditable/Discredited Distinction

The psychological burden of concealment is substantial: research by Judith Quinn and colleagues on concealed stigma (sexual orientation, mental illness, history of abuse) documents the toll of chronic monitoring, scripted interaction, and the persistent threat of unwanted disclosure. Concealment is associated with elevated cortisol levels, reduced immune function, and poorer psychological well-being.

6.3 AIDS Stigma as a Case Study

HIV/AIDS stigma provides a paradigmatic case of how multiple stigma dimensions converge:

• Perceived controllability: HIV transmission through sexual behaviour and needle use was framed as a choice, licensing moral condemnation.
• Physical contagion fear: Even after education about actual transmission routes, proximity avoidance (refusing to shake hands with, eat with, or work near HIV-positive individuals) persisted — driven by disgust-based intuitions.
• Association with already-stigmatized groups: HIV’s initial association with gay men and intravenous drug users imported existing stigma.
• Moral contamination: The purity/degradation moral foundation produced attributions of moral unworthiness that persisted independently of factual beliefs.

The AIDS stigma epidemic dramatically limited access to medical care, social support, housing, and employment — demonstrating that stigma is not merely a psychological inconvenience but a structural barrier to well-being.

6.4 Stigma Reduction Approaches

Research identifies three broad approaches to reducing stigma and expanding prosocial behaviour toward stigmatized individuals:

6.4.1 Education

Knowledge-based interventions aim to correct factual misconceptions (HIV cannot be transmitted by casual contact) and to personalize the stigmatized group (narrative accounts of individuals’ experiences). Education is most effective when: it targets specific, correctable beliefs; it comes from credible sources; and it is paired with affective components (humanizing narratives) rather than delivered as purely factual information.

6.4.2 Contact Theory

Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis (1954) proposes that intergroup contact reduces prejudice and stigma under specific conditions:

1. Equal status: Contact partners interact as equals, not in hierarchical roles.
2. Cooperative interdependence: Parties work together toward shared goals (not in competition).
3. Common goals: A shared superordinate objective replaces intergroup competition.
4. Institutional support: Authority figures endorse and support the contact.

Meta-analyses of hundreds of contact studies confirm robust stigma-reduction effects. The conditions are important but not always necessary — even indirect contact (knowing that in-group members have out-group friends, extended contact effect) reduces prejudice.

6.4.3 Structural and Intersectional Considerations

Intersectionality (Crenshaw) recognizes that individuals hold multiple social identities that interact to shape their experience of stigma and discrimination. A Black woman with a physical disability experiences not simply the sum of racism, sexism, and ableism, but their intersection, which creates unique forms of exclusion that none of the individual stigmas fully captures.

6.5 When Is Helping Harmful?

The prosocial literature must confront the uncomfortable reality that helping can harm:

• Paternalism: Helping that overrides the recipient’s autonomy — making decisions for rather than with the recipient — undermines agency and self-determination.
• Dependency effects: Sustained charitable assistance that does not build local capacity can create dependency and undermine intrinsic motivation to solve problems.
• Savior complex and “poverty tourism”: Voluntourism programmes in which wealthy individuals spend short periods in low-income communities may prioritize the volunteer’s experience over genuine community benefit.

Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan) provides a framework: helping that supports the recipient’s autonomy, competence, and relatedness is genuinely beneficial; helping that controls, creates dependency, or signals distrust of the recipient’s competence is harmful even when well-intentioned.

Chapter 7: How Is Good (Parts 1–4)? Mechanisms and Facilitators

7.1 Volunteerism: Stukas, Snyder, and Clary’s Framework

Arthur Stukas, Mark Snyder, and Gil Clary (2015) synthesize decades of research on volunteerism — one of the most studied and practically significant domains of prosocial behaviour.

7.1.1 The Functional Approach

Clary, Snyder and colleagues developed the functional approach to volunteerism, which asks not just “why do people volunteer?” but “what psychological functions does volunteering serve for different individuals?” The central insight is that the same overt behaviour (volunteering at a food bank) can serve different psychological needs for different people:

The crucial functional matching principle: volunteering is sustained when the experience fulfills the function(s) that motivated it. A volunteer who is motivated primarily by the Values function will persist if the experience provides genuine opportunities for expressing care; a volunteer motivated by the Career function will persist if the experience builds transferable skills. Mismatches between function and experience predict dropout.

7.1.2 The Reciprocity of Benefits

Research consistently shows that volunteering benefits the volunteer as well as the recipient:

• Physical health: Longitudinal studies find that volunteering is associated with lower mortality, reduced functional decline in older adults, and better self-rated health.
• Psychological well-being: Volunteering predicts higher life satisfaction, reduced depression, greater sense of meaning and purpose.
• Social capital: Volunteering builds social networks and community ties.

These benefits are not uniform: volunteering appears most beneficial when it is autonomous (not felt as obligatory), when it engages values-based or understanding functions (rather than purely protective), and when it involves meaningful direct contact with beneficiaries.

7.1.3 The Volunteer Process Model

Stukas et al. present a process model tracing the full cycle of volunteering:

Antecedents (individual and contextual factors that predict initial volunteering) → Initial Volunteering Decision (recruitment, opportunity, motivation activation) → Volunteer Experience (functional match or mismatch, quality of organizational support) → Outcomes for volunteer (well-being, social capital, skill development) and outcomes for recipients and organizations → Feedback to future volunteering (sustained engagement or attrition).

Barriers to volunteering include time constraints, perceived lack of relevant skills, negative attitudes toward recipients, organizational friction (excessive bureaucracy, poor supervision), and structural barriers (transportation, childcare, inflexible scheduling).

7.2 Organizational Prosociality

What makes organizations prosocial — reliably producing good for their employees, customers, communities, and society?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to voluntary organizational behaviour that extends beyond legal requirements to produce benefits for society. The “doing well by doing good” thesis proposes that CSR and profit are complementary: organizations that treat stakeholders well, minimize environmental harm, and contribute to communities build reputational capital that translates into customer loyalty, employee retention, and investor trust.

Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) — voluntary behaviour beyond formal job requirements that supports organizational functioning — is the organizational analogue to prosocial behaviour: mentoring new employees, helping overloaded colleagues, participating in voluntary committees, protecting organizational resources. OCB is predicted by organizational justice perceptions (fair treatment predicts going beyond the call of duty), organizational commitment, and transformational leadership.

Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan) applied to organizational prosociality: employees who feel autonomous (their work is self-chosen and aligns with values), competent (they are effective), and related (connected to colleagues and the organizational mission) are more likely to engage in OCB, show intrinsic motivation to do good work, and resist temptations to engage in unethical behaviour.

Effective altruism is a contemporary intellectual movement that applies utilitarian reasoning to charitable giving and ethical consumption: rather than giving to familiar causes or emotionally salient needs, effective altruists give to where the resources will produce the most good per dollar (using evidence from organizations like GiveWell). Critics argue that the EA approach undervalues relational commitments, ignores structural causes of poverty, and imposes a technocratic rationalism on moral life that is both epistemically overconfident and ethically impoverished.

7.3 Peacemaking: Christie and Montiel’s Framework

Daniel Christie and Cristina Montiel (2015) situate the psychology of prosocial behaviour at the largest scale — the prevention and resolution of armed conflict and the building of sustainable peace.

7.3.1 The Scope of Peace Psychology

7.3.2 Moral Disengagement in Conflict

Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement explains how ordinary people engage in harm-doing by disabling the self-regulatory mechanisms that normally inhibit unethical behaviour:

Mechanisms of moral disengagement include:

• Moral justification: Construing harmful acts as serving a higher moral purpose (“we are fighting evil”).
• Euphemistic labeling: Using sanitized language (“collateral damage,” “neutralizing targets”) that obscures the human reality of harm.
• Advantageous comparison: Comparing harmful acts to worse acts to make them seem acceptable.
• Displacement of responsibility: Attributing agency to superiors (“I was just following orders”).
• Diffusion of responsibility: Distributing agency across many actors so none feels fully responsible.
• Dehumanization: Stripping the victim of human qualities to reduce inhibitions against harming.
• Attribution of blame: Constructing the victim as the cause of their own harm.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments demonstrated that 65% of ordinary participants would administer what they believed were potentially lethal electric shocks to an innocent person when instructed by an authority figure — demonstrating the power of situational authority to override individual moral inhibitions. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (and its reanalysis) illustrated how institutional roles and situational pressures can transform ordinary people into perpetrators of cruelty.

7.3.3 Reconciliation and Restorative Approaches

Post-conflict reconciliation requires psychological processes that go beyond the cessation of violence:

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs), most notably South Africa’s post-apartheid TRC, attempt to acknowledge collective harm, restore dignity to survivors, establish a shared historical record, and create conditions for coexistence. Psychological research on TRCs suggests that:

• Acknowledgment of suffering matters more to many survivors than prosecution of perpetrators.
• Public testimony can be both therapeutic and traumatizing; support structures are essential.
• Amnesty-for-truth bargains involve moral tradeoffs between justice, reconciliation, and social stability that cannot be resolved by psychological evidence alone.

Restorative justice (Braithwaite) moves beyond retributive punishment to repair harm, restore relationships, and reintegrate offenders: offenders meet face-to-face with victims and community members; harm is acknowledged; restitution is agreed upon. Meta-analyses find that restorative justice programmes produce higher victim satisfaction, lower recidivism, and greater sense of procedural justice than traditional court processes.

GRIT strategy (Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction — Charles Osgood) is a unilateral de-escalation strategy for reducing international conflict: one party announces a small conciliatory gesture, invites reciprocation, and scales up the gestures if the other party responds in kind. The strategy works against the ratchet of mutual threat escalation by creating conditions for cooperative cycles to begin.

7.3.4 Contact Theory at Scale

Allport’s contact hypothesis has been applied to post-conflict reconciliation at the societal level. Structural peace-building requires creating conditions for positive intergroup contact at scale — through integrated schools, workplaces, and neighbourhoods; shared civic projects; cultural exchange; and political institutions that give all groups voice and representation.

7.4 Moral Elevation and Prosocial Contagion

Jonathan Haidt’s concept of moral elevation describes the positive emotional response to witnessing acts of virtue:

Prosocial contagion — the spread of helping through social networks and media — is elevation’s social amplification. Witnessing others help increases the probability of helping; media portrayals of prosocial behaviour increase real-world helping; social movement formation relies partly on the elevation produced by exemplary moral actors.

Chapter 8: Who Is Good? Personality and Individual Differences in Prosociality

8.1 The Personality-Prosociality Research Programme

Graziano, Habashi, and Tobin (2015) provide a comprehensive review of personality as a predictor of prosocial behaviour. This research programme reflects the “who is good?” question: are there stable individual differences in the tendency to help, and if so, what are their dispositional bases?

The case for personality as a prosocial predictor requires confronting the situationist challenge: if the bystander effect and normative influence can suppress or elicit helping across situations, is there stable variance left to be explained by personality? The answer, from meta-analyses of prosocial behaviour, is yes: personality explains significant variance in prosocial behaviour across studies — particularly for measures aggregated across situations and time.

8.2 Big Five Correlates of Prosociality

The Big Five personality taxonomy (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) provides the organizing framework:

8.2.1 Agreeableness

Agreeableness is the strongest, most consistent Big Five predictor of prosocial behaviour. It encompasses empathy, trust, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness. High-agreeableness individuals:

• Report more empathic concern and perspective-taking on the IRI.
• Are more cooperative in prisoner’s dilemma and public goods games.
• Provide more emotional and instrumental support in close relationships.
• Are more likely to volunteer and donate.
• Show less aggressive and competitive behaviour.

Graziano et al.’s research demonstrates that the link between agreeableness and prosocial behaviour is mediated by empathic responding: agreeable individuals respond to others’ distress with empathic concern rather than personal distress, which facilitates effective helping.

8.2.2 Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness predicts prosocial behaviour through reliability, follow-through, and organized commitment:

• Conscientious individuals are more likely to keep volunteer commitments, show up for community obligations, and follow through on pledges.
• Organizational citizenship behaviour is substantially predicted by conscientiousness.
• The prosocial contribution of conscientiousness is to the consistency of helping across time, not necessarily to spontaneous, warm-hearted generosity.

8.2.3 Extraversion

Extraversion predicts proactive, approach-oriented prosocial behaviour:

• Extraverts are more likely to initiate helping, engage in civic participation, and take leadership roles in community organizations.
• The positive affect associated with extraversion may lower the threshold for prosocial action.
• Extraversion is most predictive in contexts requiring social initiative.

8.2.4 Neuroticism

Neuroticism (emotional instability, negative affectivity) tends to interfere with prosocial behaviour, primarily through the personal distress pathway: highly neurotic individuals are more likely to respond to others’ suffering with overwhelming personal distress that motivates escape rather than helping.

8.2.5 Openness

Openness to Experience predicts moral expansiveness — the breadth of one’s moral circle:

• Open individuals show more concern for distant and statistical others, non-human animals, and future generations.
• Openness is associated with more liberal, universalistic moral frameworks.
• Creativity components of openness may support moral imagination — the ability to envision others’ situations vividly.

8.3 The Dark Triad

The Dark Triad (Paulhus & Williams) refers to three overlapping but distinguishable personality traits that predict reduced empathy and prosocial motivation:

8.4 Moral Identity

Karl Aquino and Americus Reed’s moral identity construct addresses the self-regulatory role of morality in personality:

Moral identity has two components: internalization (moral traits are important to one’s sense of who one is) and symbolization (moral traits are expressed outwardly in behaviour and appearance). Meta-analyses find that high moral identity predicts prosocial behaviour, charitable giving, volunteering, and ethical decision-making across diverse samples.

The mechanism: when moral traits are central to the self-concept, behaving prosocially is self-expressive and self-consistent; behaving selfishly or unethically generates identity threat. People high in moral identity show less moral licensing, more consistent prosocial behaviour across situations, and greater resistance to social pressure to engage in unethical behaviour.

8.5 Religiosity and Prosocial Behaviour

The relationship between religiosity and prosocial behaviour is more complex than either the “religion makes people good” thesis or the “religion is tribalism” counter-thesis:

• In-group prosociality: Religious participation strongly and consistently predicts prosocial behaviour toward fellow congregation members and in-group members. The dense social networks of religious communities generate reciprocal aid norms that substantially increase the welfare of members.
• Out-group prosociality: The relationship between religiosity and prosocial behaviour toward strangers and outgroup members is weaker and moderated by the type of religiosity.
• Intrinsic vs. extrinsic religiosity: Gordon Allport distinguished intrinsic religiosity (faith as an end in itself, integration of religious values into daily life) from extrinsic religiosity (faith as a means to social belonging, comfort, or status). Intrinsic religiosity predicts genuine prosocial motivation; extrinsic religiosity is associated with prejudice and moral hypocrisy.
• Parochial vs. universal religiosity: Religious frameworks that emphasize universal human dignity and the sacred value of all persons predict broad prosociality; those that emphasize in-group purity and out-group threat predict parochial prosociality.

8.6 The Hero and the Exemplar

Philip Zimbardo’s heroic imagination project reframes the question “who is good?” from trait-based virtue ethics to situation-ready cognitive-affective preparation:

Zimbardo’s insight — derived from his analysis of the Lucifer Effect — is that situational forces strong enough to produce atrocity in ordinary people can be resisted not primarily by exceptional virtue but by psychological preparation: anticipating social pressure, recognizing situational traps, and maintaining a sense of personal agency and responsibility.

Anne Colby and William Damon’s study of moral exemplars — extraordinary individuals who have made sustained commitments to moral causes (civil rights activists, physicians who risked their lives providing care in war zones, anti-corruption whistle-blowers) — identified distinguishing features:

1. Unity of self and morality: For moral exemplars, moral goals are not experienced as external demands conflicting with self-interest; they are central to the self. Doing the right thing is experienced as doing the most personally meaningful thing.
2. Certainty and directness: Moral exemplars do not experience prolonged uncertainty about what the right thing to do is; the moral demand is felt with compelling clarity.
3. Sustained commitment: Their prosocial commitment is not episodic but lifelong, maintained through changing circumstances.
4. Positivity: Despite facing enormous obstacles, moral exemplars typically report joy, purpose, and vitality — not martyrdom.

Chapter 9: Integration — A Framework for Doing Good

9.1 Synthesizing the Six Questions

The six-question framework of PSYCH 357 — What, Why, Where, When, How, Who is good? — provides distinct analytical lenses that together form a comprehensive account of prosocial behaviour. In this concluding chapter, those lenses are integrated into a single framework.

9.2 The Prosocial Action Cycle

Prosocial behaviour does not result from a single psychological state or decision — it emerges from a cycle of interacting factors:

1. Perceiving need (What is good?): The first step is recognizing that another person or group has a need that falls within one’s scope of moral concern. This is shaped by: moral foundations and the moral circle (who counts as deserving help); situational salience (is the need visible and unambiguous?); empathy (is the person identified and similar, triggering affective resonance?).

2. Motivational activation (Why is good?): Perceived need activates prosocial motivation through evolutionary heritage (kin detection, reciprocal altruism, reputation), empathic concern (Batson’s altruistic motive), moral emotions (guilt, indignation, elevation), and relational norms (communal vs. exchange context).

3. Contextual enabling/inhibiting (Where/When is good?): Situational factors determine whether activated motivation translates into action — bystander presence (diffusion of responsibility), normative environment (descriptive and injunctive norms), physical context (cleanliness cues, built environment), procedural justice climate, and moral licensing from prior behaviour.

4. Behavioural execution (How is good?): The specific mechanism of helping — volunteering, donating, mediating conflict, advocacy, direct aid — requires competence, opportunity, and organizational context. Functional matching (Clary & Snyder) determines whether the helping experience reinforces or extinguishes future motivation.

5. Personal characteristics (Who is good?): Individual differences — agreeableness, empathic concern, moral identity, intrinsic religiosity, openness — modulate all other components, increasing or decreasing sensitivity to need, strength of motivation, resistance to situational inhibitors, and effectiveness of helping.

6. Recursive feedback: Prosocial acts feed back into the self-concept (reinforcing moral identity), into reputation (building social capital), into relationships (deepening communal bonds), and into social norms (making helping visible and normative for others).

9.3 Barriers to Prosocial Action

A comprehensive account must inventory the barriers that prevent good intentions from producing good outcomes:

9.4 Facilitating Prosocial Action

Equally important is the inventory of mechanisms that reliably increase prosocial behaviour:

• Moral identity salience: Reminding people of their moral self-concept increases prosocial behaviour — wearing a name tag with one’s name, being asked to recall one’s values, or receiving feedback linking one’s actions to one’s moral identity.
• Perspective-taking: Instructions to imagine another’s experience increase empathic concern and helping, particularly toward stigmatized and outgroup members.
• Social norms activation: Descriptive norm information (“most people in your community donate blood”) triggers social comparison and conformity processes that increase prosocial behaviour.
• Accountability and observation: The watching-eyes effect, public commitment, and reputational stakes increase prosocial behaviour — though the quality of helping may be more strategic when externally motivated.
• Accessible emotional experience: People who have recently experienced personal loss, or who have been reminded of mortality (terror management theory), often increase charitable helping — suggesting that emotional reminders of vulnerability activate communal solidarity.
• Organizational enabling structures: Clear role definition, skill-matching, training, recognition, and meaningful engagement produce sustained volunteering; hierarchical, inflexible, and under-resourced organizations produce attrition.

9.5 Structural Limits of Individual-Level Good

One of the most important insights from a social scientific study of prosocial behaviour is that individual virtue and motivation, however admirable, are insufficient to address structural problems:

• Poverty is not primarily solved by charitable giving — it requires policy changes in taxation, labor law, healthcare, education, and housing.
• Climate change is not primarily solved by individual recycling and conservation — it requires regulatory, technological, and institutional transformation.
• Discrimination is not primarily solved by individuals becoming less prejudiced — it requires legal enforcement, institutional redesign, and cultural change.

This is not a counsel of despair: individuals acting collectively create the political conditions for structural change. Social movements — which are themselves prosocial collective action at scale — have produced the most consequential reductions in structural violence in human history: abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights, the reduction of extreme poverty, the delegitimization of colonialism. But the mechanism is collective action enabled by institutions, not the aggregation of individual charitable acts.

9.6 Being Good, Doing Good, and Living Well

The ancient Greek philosophers asked the question this course has been circling throughout: What is the good life? For Aristotle, the good life (eudaimonia) was constituted in part by virtue — living in accordance with one’s highest capacities, including the social and civic virtues. Virtue was not merely a means to well-being but partially constitutive of it.

Contemporary positive psychology’s empirical research converges on a similar conclusion: people who report the highest well-being and life satisfaction are not those who maximally pursue hedonic pleasure but those who are engaged in meaningful relationships and activities that contribute to something beyond themselves. Prosocial behaviour predicts well-being, and well-being facilitates prosocial behaviour — a positive feedback loop between doing good and living well.

The six questions of PSYCH 357 do not yield simple prescriptions:

• What is good? is culturally and contextually variable, yet bounded by universals of harm and care.
• Why is good? emerges from evolutionary heritage, developmental experience, and social embeddedness — it is not fragile or artificial, but neither is it automatic.
• Where is good? is profoundly situational — the same person helps or fails to help depending on context.
• When is good? is a question of prioritization, justice, and the limits of moral concern.
• How is good? requires competence, opportunity, functional match, and organizational enabling.
• Who is good? is everyone, in some measure, under some conditions — and the goal of moral education and institutional design is to create those conditions more reliably.

The psychology of good does not culminate in a simple conclusion. It deepens the question. That deepening is itself a form of moral progress.

End of PSYCH 357 Notes — Winter 2026