Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 43, February 2022, Pages 278-283
Current Opinion in Psychology

Review
Prosocial and punishment behaviors in everyday life

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.015Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Research can benefit from studying prosocial and punishment behaviors in daily life.

  • Experience sampling and diary methods can document natural phenomena and compare the laboratory and the field.

  • These methods can test theory across situations, relationships, and time.

  • These methods show the limits of experiments that focus on a narrow set of situations.

Abstract

Theory and experiments suggest people have different strategies (1) to condition their prosocial behavior in ways that maximize individual benefits and (2) to punish others who have exploited their own and others’ prosocial behaviors. To date, most research testing existing theories has relied on experiments. However, documenting prosocial and punishment behaviors outside of the laboratory via experience sampling and diary methods can yield additional, rich insights. Recent work demonstrates these methods can describe social behaviors in daily life and be used to test theory about how behaviors change across situations and relationships. These methods have exposed discrepancies between what people experience in daily life and the problems researchers want to solve to understand the nature of human prosociality.

Keywords

Cooperation
Punishment
Gossip
Reputation
Experience sampling
Diary method

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This research was funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant (864519) awarded to Daniel Balliet.