لذت و نفع اجتماعی مبتنی بر فشار انگیزه: روابط واگرا برای رفاه ذهنی

We propose two fundamentally different motives for helping: gaining pleasure and fulfilling one’s duty (“pressure”). Using the newly developed Pleasure and Pressure based Prosocial Motivation Scale, we demonstrated the distinctiveness of pleasure and pressure based prosocial motivation in three studies. Although the two motives exhibited different relations to a variety of personality characteristics, they were similarly related to trans-situational helping. Of particular interest, pleasure based prosocial motivation was positively related to self-actualization, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and positive affect and negatively related to negative affect. On the contrary, pressure based prosocial motivation was unrelated to self-actualization, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and positive affect but positively related to negative affect. These results qualify research showing that prosocial life goals generally increase subjective well-being.

Helpful behavior depends on situational variables (e.g., Batson, 1991, Latané and Darley, 1970 and Piliavin et al., 1981) and on stable dispositions (e.g., Bierhoff et al., 1991, Eisenberg et al., 2002, Penner and Finkelstein, 1998 and Staub, 1974). Research on both aspects has raised important questions about why people help, with a large amount of debate about whether helpfulness is always motivated by egoistic concerns (e.g., Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997) or whether helpfulness can also be an expression of pure selflessness (e.g., Batson, 1998). The present research takes a different perspective on this issue. Specifically, we postulate two broad motives underlying a prosocial orientation as a stable personality variable (i.e., the prosocial personality): Pleasure based prosocial motivation and pressure based prosocial motivation. In this paper, we introduce a measure of these motives and show that the distinction between the two motivations provides a more complete understanding of the prosocial personality.