Explore projects in Prosocial Behavior!
Projects in prosocial behavior focus on understanding the motivations, development, and impact of actions intended to benefit others—such as helping, sharing, cooperating, and showing empathy. These studies explore how prosocial tendencies emerge across childhood and adolescence, and the roles that parenting, peer relationships, school environments, and cultural values play in shaping them. Researchers often examine factors like moral reasoning, emotional regulation, and social-cognitive skills that support prosocial development. Many projects also investigate interventions that foster kindness, compassion, and civic engagement, especially in educational and community settings, with the goal of promoting positive youth development and stronger, more connected communities.
“Children helping each other to fetch water 1” by Tonny Mpagi is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International via Wikimedia Commons
- The development of cooperative norms and behaviors in childhoodProject Abstract/Summary Cooperative behaviors are a cornerstone of human interaction. It is well known that external factors are important in driving cooperative behaviors: people cooperate to avoid punishment and to maintain positive reputations. However, these external factors do not provide a full account of the variables influencing cooperative behaviors. This project tests the hypothesis that cooperative decisions are also driven by internal motives and that childhood represents an important period during which these internal motives are acquired. Broader impacts of… Read more: The development of cooperative norms and behaviors in childhood