Personality And Situational Start The Pro-social Behavior

Prosocial behavior is the label for a broad category of actions that are "defined by society as generally beneficial to other people and to the ongoing political system" (Piliavin etal. 1981). Prosocial behavior is always focused by psychologists and educational experts. This paper reviewed the literature on prosocial behavior and explored the effects of personality and situation primed on it. This paper is composed by two parts.In the first part, we reviewed the history of prosocial behavior research, introduced the concept and category of prosocial behavior from the perspective of psychology, such as research methods and models and influenced factors of individual and situation. Especially, we indicated the relations between empathy and prosocial behavior, cross-culture factors on prosocial behavior were discussed, the development and intervention of prosocial behavior were illuminated here.The second part is the central content which included a series of experiments on prosocial behavior. First, we analyzed the development of moral research and automatically social behavior, base on the review of literature, we advanced a new viewpoint about prosocial behavior which suggested that "prosocial behavior=f(personality× situation)", the role of personality and situation on prosocial behavior were examined. Total 8 study had been done.Study 1 examined the influence of moral traits prime on helping behavior. The results demonstrated that compared with the participants in controlled condition, the participants who were primed by moral traits showed higher endowment, whether the participants were primed subliminally or notStudy 2 examined the implicit bystander effect in different prime conditions. The results of the experiments showed that compared with the participants in controlled condition, the participants who imagined the crowded situations or loneliness situations showed lower helping intention.Study 3 examined the role of the concept of "BaoYing" on helping behavior. The results of the experiments show that compared with the participants in controlled condition, the participants who were primed by the concept of "BaoYing" showed higher helping behavior, whether the participants were primed subliminally or notStudy 4 examined the role of the moral traits prime on potential helper's emotion and behavior. The results of the experiment showed that compared with the participants in controlled condition, moral traits priming strengthened empathic reactions, personal distress and helping behavior, behavior decision and emotion influenced each other in self-monitoring.Study 5 examined the role of the friend primes on helping behavior and its mental function.