In psychology, prosocial tendencies (behaviors that benefit[s] other people or society as a whole) are usually measured using experiments where people allocate material resources. Most of these experiments – ultimatum bargaining games, dictator games, and public good dilemmas use zero-sum situations where one person’s gain is equivalent to another’s loss.
“In the current literature, cooperation typically involves a cost: In an interdependent situation, people face a choice between increasing their private gains (or reducing private losses) or increasing the greater good.”
A study by Niels Van Doesum et al., however, suggests that this does not capture the entirety of human cooperation. According to the researchers, models of human cooperation based entirely on reciprocity and punishment is inadequate to explain prosociality in the real world. Often, cooperation involves negligible material cost but careful consideration of the needs and interests of others.
Imagine you were at the breakfast cereal aisle of a supermarket. You are trying to choose between the last box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes and a box of Kellogg's Froot Loops. You notice a stranger heading straight for the section you are at. If you take the box of Frosted Flakes, the stranger will be left with only one choice. Suspecting that the stranger would appreciate having both choices, you pick a box of Froot Loops. This is an action that requires benevolent perspective-taking, a sign of social mindfulness.
In the study, researchers asked participants to choose a product from an array of products (one red among two green apples or one yellow among three blue baseball hats). If the participant chose one of the nonunique products (e.g., a green apple or a blue hat), the choice was scored as socially mindful. Social mindfulness was calculated as the percentage of socially mindful choices across experimental trials.
Researchers measured social mindfulness at the individual level and at the country level (mean of individual scores). They examined if cross-national differences in social mindfulness were associated with indicators of national prosperity and inequality, civic cooperation, competitiveness, rule of law, democracy, religiosity, and Environmental Performance Index (EPI).
Researchers measured social mindfulness at the individual level and at the country level (mean of individual scores). They examined if cross-national differences in social mindfulness were associated with indicators of national prosperity and inequality, civic cooperation, competitiveness, rule of law, democracy, religiosity, and Environmental Performance Index (EPI).
Between-countries variability was found to be statistically larger than the average within-country variability. At the national-level, Japan scored the highest in social mindfulness followed by (in descending order) Austria, Mexico, Israel, Czech Republic, Switzerland, etc. Social mindfulness was positively related to the established measure of prosociality called SVO (social value orientation is a person’s preference about how to allocate resources between the self and another person) at the national and individual levels. However, ranking and pattern associations did not overlap significantly for SVO and social mindfulness. This indicates that social mindfulness captures a dimension of prosociality that is inaccessible to traditional measures that use allocation of material resources.
Social mindfulness at the national level was positively associated with economic prosperity (GDP) and gross national income (GNI), rule of law, and economic competitiveness. It was negatively associated with income inequality and religiosity. The strongest association was between social mindfulness and Environmental Performance Index (efficiency in resource utilization, recycling and reduction of pollution, waste and emissions), a measure of people’s concern for environmental sustainability.
Read more about the study here.
