Prosocial behavior is important for the functioning of society. This study investigates the extent to which environment shared by family members, nonshared environment, and genetics account for children's prosocial behavior. The prosocial behavior of twins (9,424 pairs) was rated by their parents at the ages of 2, 3, 4, and 7 and by their teachers at age 7. For parent ratings, shared environmen...

Prosocial behavior first appears in the second year of life. How can prosociality so early in life be explained? One possibility is that infants possess specialized cognitive and/or social capacities that drive its emergence. A second possibility is that prosocial behavior emerges out of infants’ shared activities and relationships with others. These possibilities have motivated a number of cur...

A persistent puzzle in the social and biological sciences is the existence of prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others, often at a cost to oneself. Recent theoretical models and empirical studies of indirect reciprocity show that actors behave prosocially in order to develop an altruistic reputation and receive future benefits from third parties. Accordingly, individuals should stop inve...

The study tested whether children's prosocial behavior was negatively or positively related to children's and mothers' psychological problems. Participants were 149 London families when mothers were pregnant and followed up in infancy and at ages 4 and 11. Children's cooperation at 4 and general prosocial tendencies at 11 were negatively associated with externalizing problems but unrelated to i...

Previous research has shown that exposure to violent video games increases aggression, whereas exposure to prosocial video games can reduce aggressive behavior. However, little is known about the neural correlates of these behavioral effects. This work is the first to investigate the electrophysiological features of the relationship between playing a prosocial video game and inhibition of aggre...

The study of prosocial behavior--altruism, cooperation, trust, and the related moral emotions--has matured enough to produce general scholarly consensus that prosociality is widespread, intuitive, and rooted deeply within our biological makeup. Several evolutionary frameworks model the conditions under which prosocial behavior is evolutionarily viable, yet no unifying treatment exists of the ps...

Prosocial behaviors typically benefit those who perform them but can create mixed emotions in recipients. Yet, how does prosociality affect the well-being of those who merely observe it? The current study aimed to answer this question by experimentally prompting employees to perform prosocial acts at work (Givers), be the recipient of such acts (Receivers), or to do neither (Observers). Our foc...