An experiment on individual ‘parochial altruism’ revealing no connection between individual ‘altruism’ and individual ‘parochialism’

Philip Corr, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, Charles Seger, Kei Tsutsui

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21 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

Is parochial altruism an attribute of individual behavior? This is the question we address with an experiment. We examine whether the individual pro-sociality that is revealed in the public goods and trust games when interacting with fellow group members helps predict individual parochialism, as measured by the in-group bias (i.e., the difference in these games in pro-sociality when interacting with own group members as compared with members of another group). We find that it is not. An examination of the Big-5 personality predictors of each behavior reinforces this result: they are different. In short, knowing how pro-social individuals are with respect to fellow group members does not help predict their parochialism.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1261
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Aug 2015

Keywords

  • parochial altruism
  • in-group bias
  • pro-sociality
  • personality

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