Under the Umbrella of Prosocial Behavior – A Critical Comparison of Paradigms

Despite the discontent, cruelty, and warfare that fill the daily news, people show tremendous capacities to help and cooperate with others. Prosocial behavior is used as an umbrella term capturing the diversity of selfless acts. As such, researchers have developed a variety of tasks and it is crucial to verify that they measure the same underlying construct of prosocial behavior. Previous studies have focused on comparing anonymous, one-shot economic games providing evidence for behavioral consistency across games. The current study extends these findings by (i) comparing both repeated economic and naturalistic interactive games in a within-subject design, and (ii) letting participants play in face-to-face dyadic settings. In total, 74 participants completed six tasks: three variants of a social dilemma game, an Egg Hunt game measuring helping behavior, a group decision-making paradigm requiring communication skills, and a Tangram game where participants solved puzzles together. A Principal Component Analysis revealed that two components best describe the behavior in these tasks. The three social dilemma games loaded on the first component, termed “social dilemma games”. These games were distinct from the interactive games and the helping and decision-making tasks loaded on the second component, termed “naturalistic games”. The Tangram game was unrelated to all other games. These findings suggest that the behavioral consistency observed in economic games has its limits to generalize to other types of tasks and emphasizes the importance of choosing the appropriate (combination of) paradigms to measure prosocial behavior. Theoretical and methodological differences between tasks are discussed to explain these findings.