The core tendencies underlying individual differences in prosocial behavior - WP1

Prior research has shown that certain personality traits account for individual differences in prosocial behaviour in certain situations. To provide a systematic understanding of these findings, Thielmann, Spadaro, and Balliet (2020) proposed an affordance-based framework providing clear hypotheses about which personality traits should predict prosocial behaviour under which circumstances. The current project aims to provide a conclusive test of this framework by specifically testing the framework’s key proposition that four broad trait classes can be identified, each of which predicts prosocial behaviour in the presence of a different situational affordance. To this end, we use data from the Prosocial Personality Project, a large-scale longitudinal study including various measures of personality and prosocial behaviour. We base our (pre-registered) analyses on a sample of N = 2649 participants who completed one of six economic games measuring incentivized prosocial behaviour in the presence of different situational affordances. We apply bifactor modelling to extract the shared variance among traits reflecting the same dispositional class and will predict prosocial behaviour using these latent “core tendencies”.