The conceptualisation & measurement of prosociality

Vanags, Paul (2026). The conceptualisation & measurement of prosociality. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Vanags2026PhD.pdf
Text - Accepted Version
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (7MB)

Abstract

Prosociality - attitudes and behaviours intended to benefit others - is a defining feature of human social life. While other animals exhibit limited forms of helping or cooperation, humans are an extreme outlier in both the scale and diversity of prosocial behaviours they display, including donating, cooperating, volunteering, and helping others, often at substantial personal cost or risk. These behaviours have been fundamental to the development of human societies and to our success as a species. Consequently, understanding the causes, mechanisms, and boundary conditions of prosociality is a central aim of psychological science.

This thesis examines prosociality at two levels: empirical and conceptual. At the empirical level, I present two lines of work (Chapter 2 and Chapters 3–5) examining how prosocial attitudes and behaviours vary as a function of financial status, and how they manifest in a novel group-based reward decision-making task. In Chapter 2, using a globally representative dataset, I show that higher income and greater subjective financial satisfaction are reliably associated with higher reported prosociality across a wide range of measures and cultural contexts. Chapters 3–5 describe the development of a new public-goods-style task, derived from social foraging theory, designed to capture key features of real-world dynamics, such as those elicited in Chapter 2, more closely than its predecessors. Results from three experiments probing reward-based decision-making in group contexts are presented.

In addition to the empirical work, the thesis addresses how prosociality is conceptualised and measured. This unresolved issue is critical because no single, widely accepted definition exists, key terms are often left undefined, and prosociality is frequently operationalised using single measures despite its conceptual breadth. As a result, the foundations of much prosociality research are fragile. In the general introduction, I argue for caution in treating prosociality as a unified empirical construct, and suggest that subtypes such as altruism and cooperation offer greater methodological clarity. The concluding discussion illustrates how this approach improves the validity of inferences drawn from the empirical studies.

Together, these findings provide new insights into prosocial behaviour while highlighting the importance of clear conceptualisation and rigorous measurement in psychological science.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):