TITLE:
The Concept of Value Priorities; Could It Be the Crucial Link between Prosocial Motives and Helping Behavior?
AUTHORS:
Kutlu Caliskan
KEYWORDS:
Prosocial Behavior, Personal Values, Prosocial Motives, Helping Behavior
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.13 No.1,
January
27,
2025
ABSTRACT: Prosocial behavior has long posed a challenge to social scientists. Researchers seek to understand why people engage in helping behaviors even it can be costly to the actor. There are a number of reasons why people engage in prosocial behavior. Those were defined as “prosocial motives” defined by emphatic/altruistic concerns, evolutionary influences, reciprocal benefits, internalized principles, or egoistic reasons. We propose a framework that integrates two constructs for predicting prosocial behavior: prosocial motives and values. We believe that each prosocial motive will trigger a different value priority in explaining prosocial behavior. A total of 407 participants from 12 countries took part in the study. The basic requirements for participants are to volunteer in a civic engagement programme and/or regularly participate in community service. We provide a discriminative model to assess the hypotheses by looking at the direct and indirect effects of two cohesive variables that predict prosocial behavior: “prosocial motives” and “personal values.” Regression with multi-group analysis was used to estimate and probe moderated model interactions and conditional indirect effects. The study’s findings revealed patterns of correlations in a way that prosocial motives interact as moral agents with personal values and regulate value-behavior congruities explaining prosocial behavior.