Prosocial Computing

Daniel Batson has written a couple of great survey papers on why people perform prosocial acts. Here I will summarize these motivations and discuss how this applies to prosocial computing.

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.