Understanding Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviours: The Roles of Self-Focused and Other-Focused Motivational Orientations

We examine how individual differences in self-focused and other-focused orientations relate to prosocial (e.g., helping, volunteerism) and antisocial (e.g., theft, violence) behaviours/attitudes. Using four datasets (total N = 176,216; across 78 countries), we find that other-focused orientations (e.g., socially focused values, intimacy motivation, compassionate/communal traits) generally relate positively to prosocial outcomes and negatively to antisocial outcomes. These effects are highly consistent cross-nationally and across multiple ways of operationalizing constructs. In contrast, self-focused orientations (e.g., personally focused values, power motivation, assertive/agentic traits) tend to relate positively to both antisocial and prosocial outcomes. However, associations with prosocial outcomes vary substantially across nations and construct operationalizations. Overall, the effects of other-focused orientations are consistently larger than those of self-focused orientations. We discuss the implications of these findings for interventions that target self-focused and other-focused motivations to influence prosocial and antisocial outcomes.