Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2024-02-18
Abstract： Previous studies have discovered that the concept of prosocial behavior among adolescents is composed of four dimensions: commonweal-social rule, altruism, relationship, and personal trait. Utilizing this four-dimensional structure, the Prosocial Behavior Scale for Adolescents (PBSA) measurements revealed gender and grade-level differences in the importance attributed to each dimension. Furthermore, numerous prior studies on the development of adolescent prosocial behavior have yielded inconsistent results. In this study, we employed a network analysis approach to explore the network of adolescent prosocial behavior, uncovering the relationships among different dimensions and individual questionnaire items, revealing its core dimensions, and shedding light on differences across gender and grade.
Conducted in 2017, this study included 9,160 students from 15 schools spanning eight provinces or municipalities, namely Beijing, Fujian, Henan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Chongqing, with ages ranging from 10 to 17 and covering elementary, middle, and high school students. We utilized the PBSA, consisting of 15 items based on the four-dimensional concept, to assess and analyze the network of adolescent prosocial behavior. The network analysis process followed the standardization guidelines published by Epskamp et al, utilizing qgraph in the R programming for network estimation and computation of centrality indices. Finally, we performed comparisons of dimension networks and item networks across different genders and grades.
In the overall network of adolescent prosocial behavior, as well as in the grade- and gender-based networks, the commonweal-social rule dimension consistently exhibited the highest centrality, followed by altruism, relationship, and traits dimensions. Compared to the prosocial behavior network in females, the male prosocial behavior network showed higher centrality in the commonweal-social rule and relationship dimensions, occupying more central positions within the network. When comparing prosocial behavior networks across different grades, the commonweal-social rule dimension occupied the most central position in all grades. Moreover, its centrality was highest in the middle school group. The centrality of the altruism dimension was highest in the high school group, while the relationship and personal trait dimensions held the highest centrality in the elementary school group. As for the network structure, no differences were found in the gender-based dimension networks. However, differences were identified in the grade-based dimension networks, with high school students exhibiting significantly weaker network strength than middle and elementary school students. Similarly, no notable differences were observed in the item networks based on gender, but differences were found in the item networks based on grade.
Taken together, the current study has found that, in the overall sample as well as among different genders and grades, the commonweal-social rule consistently serves as a core dimension within the network structure of prosocial behavior. There were significant grade differences in both dimension networks and item prosocial behavior networks, along with subtle gender differences in item networks. These results provide a new perspective for deepening our understanding of adolescent prosocial behavior and expanding the research domain of prosocial behavior. These findings suggest that future interventions targeting the commonweal-social rule and altruism dimensions could potentially boost overall prosocial behavior in adolescents. The middle school stage may be a critical period for promoting commonweal-social rule prosocial behavior.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-12-07
Abstract： Cooperation among strangers is a key feature of social capital which facilitates societies to effectively compete with other societies. Notably, cooperation among strangers does not remain permanent or stable within a society but can shift with changes in ecology and culture.
In the past few decades, China has experienced tremendous social changes, mainly manifested in rapid economic growth, rising urbanization level, more widespread higher education, and rapid development of the internet. Meanwhile, people’s residential mobility and social interaction scope has expanded. Acquaintance society has been shrinking while stranger society has been expanding. Interpersonal trust has declined and individualism has increased. However, little is known about whether cooperation (operationalized as cooperative behavior in social dilemmas) among strangers has shifted along with above societal changes within Chinese society. Thus, based on the history of experimental research on cooperation among young Chinese adults in situations involving conflicting interests (i.e., social dilemmas), this study meta-analyzed 254 studies conducted between 1999 and 2019 with 302 unique samples and effect sizes involving 29,249 participants to test for possible changes over time in cooperation among strangers.
We conducted meta-regression analyses applying a three-level mixed-effects meta-regression model and performed multiple imputation to handle missing data in our model. For all analyses, year of data collection was entered as the predictor, and the cooperation estimate as the outcome variable. In addition, we also simultaneously added the study characteristic variables (i.e., dilemma type, proportion of male participants, repetitions, group size, K index, communication, sanctions, and period of cooperation) as control variables to the meta-regression models to rule out the possibility that changes in cooperation are explained by study characteristics. Finally, we also calculated the magnitude of change in cooperation and reported the correlations between the sociocultural indicators and cooperation.
We found cooperation among strangers increased over time in Chinese society: The cooperation rate had increased from 0.33 in 1999 to 0.45 in 2019 after controlling for other variables. In addition, some societal indicators (e.g., societal wealth, urbanization level, higher education level, and internet penetration rate) measured 10 to 5 years prior to measures of cooperation were found to be positively associated with cooperation, suggesting that they may be potential societal underpinnings of increases in cooperation. The cooperative behavior among strangers in China and the United States shows a similar upward trend, but cooperation in Chinese society has a larger increase in a shorter period. These findings have important implications for boosting public confidence in solving present and future challenges.
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