What the World Needs Now: An Intervention for Promoting Prosocial Behavior

Abstract Prosocial behavior benefits individuals and society. Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop a new, integrative intervention for fostering prosocial behavior. The intervention combines activities such as watching an elevating video, enacting prosocial behaviors, and reflecting on how those behaviors relate to one’s values. An experiment with 116 adolescents and young adults indicated that the intervention was efficacious in enhancing prosocial behavior and related constructs (e.g., empathy) and that these effects were maintained 1 month later. These results have important implications for understanding and promoting prosocial habits.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Basic and Applied Social Psychology

• Publication date

  2019-07-04

• Fields of study

  Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/01973533.2019.1639507
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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