Batson proposes four motives for prosocial action: egoism, altruism, collectivism and priciplism.

The ultimate goal of egoism is to benefit one’s self. There are many of these self-benefits and they can be organized into gaining rewards, avoiding punishments and reducing aversion arousal. Rewards can be material, social and self-rewards such as emphatic joy; punishments include avoiding fines and sanctions for norm violation; reducing normal arousal includes escaping one’s distress, escaping discrepancy and injustice.

The second type of motive for prosocial action is altruism, with the ultimate goal of benefitting one or more people other than self. The most studied altruistic motivation is empathy-altruism, which motivates people through the emphatic feelings when perceiving others in need. Many have proposed that empathy-altruism is ultimately a form of egoism. For example, people behave altruistically because they want to reduce aversive-arousal (eliminate the emphatic feelings), empathy-specific punishment (not wanting to feel shame or guilt), and empathy-specific reward (getting praise), which are all for the purpose of benefiting one’s self. But Batson and others have shown that acting with the goal of benefiting another does exist.

Third type of motivation for prosocial actions is collectivism. The ultimate goal with collectivism motivation is to increase the welfare of a group. Studies have shown that having a group identity can encourage people to help others within the group. Similar to altruism, it is also hard to discern between collectivism and egoism. However, Robyn Dawes and his colleagues have shown that people do choose to benefit the group over higher self-rewards, if discussion has occurred before the decision.

Lastly, people may be motivated to act prosocially because of principlism. People help others because they believe they should uphold some sort of moral principle.

This breakdown offers one way of thinking about prosocial computing – what are the driving forces that we can leverage in computing and how should we use them to encourage prosocial behavior.
Most existing prosocial services appeal to egoism. Examples including using financial rewards to encourage answers to others’ questions (mahalo answers), using reciprocity credit for ridesharing (rideshare), and reputation, esteem, praise for general online contribution (wikipedia and other knowledge sharing sites). Donation-based services rely on altruism, at least to a certain degree. These sites often use visual media designed to trigger emphatic moods. Online support groups use collectivism or shared social identity to encourage contributions.

On the other hand, punishments are not often used in prosocial technologies, mostly since people can simply choose not to use the technologies if the punishments are severe. One possible example of a prosocial computing technology that motivates by punishment is stickK, where people have to pay if they fail to achieve their goal. A key point to note is that stickK is only prosocial if the user goal is prosocial, e.g., if the self set goal is “I will help 3 people today.” I also cannot really think of any good examples of prosocial computing that rely on principlism (any good examples?).

As Batson pointed out, egoism is powerful and easy to invoke. However, they are also fickle and may not encourage people to care about the underlying societal goals. The strength of altruism varies depending on the beneficiary of the action (more likely to have emphatic feelings for friends than strangers), and may only apply to specific, concrete beneficiaries than abstract and large-scale problems that some people may not easily relate to. A challenge with collectivism is that it may require the creation of an in-group, which, while may benefit individuals at the group level, may not be ideal at a larger global level. Finally, the benefit of principlism is that it’s directed towards universal and impartial good. However, these motivations are also vulnerable to rationalization—we are good at explaining to ourselves why certain rules may be bent in various conditions.

Some questions to think about:
Are there other motivations to encourage prosocial behavior? Are there ways to incorporate some of the underused motivators into prosocial computing? Can we combine multiple motivators together to compensate for the limitations with individual motivators?

Some references:
Batson, D. (1991). The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Batson, D., Ahmad, N., Tsang, J. (2002) Four Motives for Community Involvement . Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58, pp.429-445

Dawes, R. M. (1980). Social dilemmas. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 169–193.

Is volunteer computing a type of prosocial computing? The answer is yes because it enables people to contribute in a way that they were unable to previously. For a project like SETI@home, the only requirement is a computer with internet connection, 20 MB of free disk space and 64 MB of RAM and a quick installing. Then, just by leaving on the computer, like many users typically do, the computing cycles can make a difference.

There are many online resources on volunteer computing (e.g. here, here, and here). But the question I want to focus on is why don’t more people participate? These projects are for interesting causes that most people would care about, such as finding extraterrestrial life. Additionally, the upkeep costs are minimal and require no human effort. But I think there are two main problems with how volunteer computing is currently set up. First, there is an initial startup cost. People need to download and install the software plus they may be skeptical about research software and are worried about “losing” control of their computers. But another problem is that since volunteer computing is used to tackle large scale problems, there may be no immediate, tangible reward that can offset the startup cost.

Here’s a thought. What if we shift the burden of using idle computing cycles for good causes to commercial software companies? Imagine that by default, your operating system will detect if you are using the computer, and if not, it would donate the computing cycles. This would certainly remove the startup cost for volunteer computing. But what would this take? And are there drawbacks?

Why do we need prosocial technologies? In an age where we are faced with many large scale global problems, prosocial behaviors are no longer moral obligations, but are necessities for survival. We can no longer afford to be focused on making only ourselves better because we cannot be better off unless everyone else are better off. We all experience it with the current economic crisis—one country cannot be successful when other countries’ economies are failing. In the past, we have relied on individual altruism, financial rewards and government policies to encourage people to perform actions that benefit the greater good, but there is no reason why computing cannot help. In fact, computing may be able to help in four ways. We should be able to use computing to (1) decrease the cost of individuals performing prosocial behaviors, (2) increase the impact of individuals’ prosocial behaviors, (3) encourage more prosocial behaviors, and also to (4) channel everyday mundane actions to result in prosocial outcomes. If everyone can directly or indirectly contribute a little bit more, then as a whole, we may be able to overcome many different types of problems such as reducing world poverty and encouraging better online user-contributions.

Why do we need a new domain, prosocial computing? The main reason is that existing domains do not fully encompass the essence of prosocial computing and that having a new domain can help raise awareness for what prosocial computing is trying to accomplish. While examples of prosocial technologies exist, having a concrete definition along with clear examples will hopefully result in more and better prosocial technologies. From a scientific standpoint, prosocial computing is also a natural progression for where computing should be heading. Computing technologies have progressed from focusing on individual users interacting with computers to individuals interacting with each other, through computers. But despite the focus on social relationships, the main beneficiaries of current technologies are still the individual users. Prosocial computing takes the one to the many progression a step further and challenges us to design technologies that benefit not just the single users, but can also help everyone else.