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What personality traits are linked to prosocial behavior?

Daria Guguianu-Tincu

S4732693

Department of Psychology, University of Groningen

PSBE1-05: Personality and individual differences

Teacher: Dr(s). Bertus Jeronimus

June 2022
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What personality traits are linked to prosocial behavior?

Prosocial behavior is broadly described as the range of actions that are meant to

benefit others, even at personal costs. Some examples of such behaviors include sharing,

cooperating, giving, comforting, and helping others. People vary in their willingness to

engage in actions that will benefit others and it seems that certain personality traits are linked

with a higher probability of behaving in a prosocial manner. Personality traits are defined as

“relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reflect the tendency to

respond in certain ways under certain circumstances” (Thielmann et al., 2022). In this paper, I

will assess some of these traits and the way in which they influence behavior, focusing

especially on the Big Five, the HEXACO model, and the Dark Triad.

People can have different motivations to behave in a helpful manner and on the

positive side of the continuum we have the traits included in the HEXACO model, a higher-

level personality construct that builds on the Big Five model, adding the dimension of

Honesty-Humility. This dimension has been shown to account for multiple instances of

prosociality (Thielmann et al., 2022) and is described as the tendency to be fair and genuine

when dealing with others, cooperating with them even if there might be a threat of

exploitation. When it comes to The Big Five taxonomy, the single best predictor of prosocial

behavior seems to be Agreeableness (Wertag & Bratko, 2019), which is defined as the

tendency to be tolerant, forgiving, and to want to cooperate with others, even if one might be

exploited. Even though these two dimensions seem highly similar, Honesty-Humility has been

associated with active cooperation, while Agreeableness with reactive cooperation. Moreover,

Thielmann et al. (2022) argued that Honesty-Humility has been shown to account for

prosocial behavior when the situation provides a possibility for exploitation, while

Agreeableness has been shown to account for prosocial behavior when the situation provides

a possibility for reciprocity.

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On the negative side, accounting for the the possibility of people engaging in prosocial

behavior for personal benefit is the trait of Machiavellianism. People who possess this trait

care deeply about their reputation and seem to be willing to help only in the presence of

others. The results of the study conducted by Wertag and Bratko (2019) showed that the traits

included in the Dark Triad, especially Machiavellianism, explained self-reported prosocial

tendencies and prosocial behavior better than the HEXACO model, being negatively linked to

prosocial tendencies and behavior. The results also show the importance of the Dark Triad in

the personality space, despite the usually negative connotations attributed to these personality

traits.

An important aspect to remember is that even though some traits are linked to a higher

tendency of behaving in a prosocial way, it is hard to predict behavior by only taking into

account personality traits. One must also consider whether the situation affords the expression

of the trait. As a direction for further research in the field, stronger integration of both aspects,

in an affordance-based framework, would lead to a better understanding of what prosocial

personality is and how it varies across situations.

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References

Thielmann, I., Hilbig, B. E., & Zettler, I. (2022). The dispositional basis of human

prosociality. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 289–294.

https://doiorg.proxyub.rug.nl/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.009

Wertag, A., & Bratko, D. (2019). In search of the prosocial personality: Personality traits as

predictors of prosociality and prosocial behavior. Journal of Individual

Differences, 40(1), 55–62.

https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1027/1614-0001/a000276