Acute anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with higher levels of everyday altruism

Vieira, Joana B.; Pierzchajlo, Stephen; Jangard, Simon; Marsh, Ashley; A, Olsson

doi:10.31234/osf.io/n3t5c

Cited by 20 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…On the one hand, there is the popular view that human nature is inherently self-serving and selfish. However, challenging contexts such as this pandemic may actually promote helping behavior ( Vieira et al, 2020 ). Helping behavior is an element of human association that emphasizes the cohesive social bond that holds a group together and which is valued and understood by all group members ( Bowe et al., 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Helping Behavior of Older Adults during the Early COVID-19 Lockdown in Belgium

et al. 2022

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This study aimed to understand whether older adults not only received but also provided help during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Belgium, which factors motivated them to help, and whether older adults differed from younger age groups in terms of helping behavior and motives. Bivariate analyses were performed using data generated from an online cross-sectional survey in Belgium ( N = 1892). The results showed that older adults who received help also provided it. This “interdependence” – mutual or reciprocal dependence – occurred regardless of age. In terms of motives for providing help, both older adults and their younger peers were primarily motivated by present-oriented and emotion-related motivation: older people were motivated to provide help by altruistic values and humanism, and enhancement motives linked to self-development. Policy implications of these results entail: during crisis situations, make use of the bond between older adults and their neighbors, such as caring communities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Helping Behavior of Older Adults during the Early COVID-19 Lockdown in Belgium

et al. 2022

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“…On the one hand, there is the long-held popular view that human nature is inherently self-serving and selfish. However, challenging contexts, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, may actually promote altruism (Vieira et al, 2020). Prosocial behaviors could be driven by altruistic motives focused on maximizing others wins or egoistic motives focused on maximizing own wins.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 Protective Behaviors Are Forms of Prosocial and Unselfish Behaviors

Dinić

Bodroža

2021

Front. Psychol.

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The aim of this study was to explore the effects of prosocial and antisocial personality tendencies and context-related state factors on compliance with protective behaviors to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections. Six types of prosocial tendencies (altruism, dire, compliant, emotional, public, and anonymous) and selfishness as the antisocial tendency were included as personality factors, while fear related to the pandemic and empathy toward vulnerable groups (i.e., those in forced isolation) were context-related factors. Furthermore, mediation effect of empathy and moderation effect of fear were explored in relations between personality factors and protective behaviors. The sample included 581 participants (78.3% females). The data were collected from March 28 to April 6, 2020, during the emergency state and curfew in Serbia. The results showed that tendency to help anonymously had a positive effect and selfishness had a negative effect on protective behaviors, over and above demographic characteristics and context-related factors. Among context-related factors, only fear related to the pandemic had a significant unique positive effect on protective behaviors, but it had no moderator effect in the relationship between personality traits and protective behaviors. However, empathy acted as a mediator and partly accounted for the negative effect of selfishness and positive effect of tendency to help anonymously on protective behaviors. The results revealed that compliance with protective measures could be seen as prosocial and unselfish form of behavior. Furthermore, these findings have practical implications for shaping public messages and they can help effectively promote health-responsible behaviors.

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“…Thus, (anti-)social behavior online may have increased and gained relevance for (anti-)social behavior in the real-world [9] . In line with this expectation, current research indicates that both proand anti-social behaviors increase during crises and that these trends can be observed in both online and realworld settings [3,10,11] . It is at present unclear how persistent such dynamics are and how they relate to one another.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Measuring Social Solidarity During Crisis: The Role of Design Choices

2022

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Building on our previous work, we assess how social solidarity towards migrants and refugees has changed before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, by collecting and analyzing a large, novel, and longitudinal dataset of migration-related tweets. To this end, we first annotate above 2000 tweets for (anti-) solidarity expressions towards immigrants, utilizing two annotation approaches (experts vs. crowds).On these annotations, we train a BERT model with multiple data augmentation strategies, which performs close to the human upper bound. We use this high-quality model to automatically label over 240 000 tweets between September 2019 and June 2021. We then assess the automatically labeled data for how statements related to migrant (anti-)solidarity developed over time, before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Our findings show that migrant solidarity became increasingly salient and contested during the early stages of the pandemic but declined in importance since late 2020, with tweet numbers falling slightly below prepandemic levels in summer 2021. During the same period, the share of anti-solidarity tweets increased in a subsample of COVID-19-related tweets. These findings highlight the importance of long-term observation, preand post-crisis comparison, and sampling in research interested in crisis related effects. As one of our main contributions, we outline potential pitfalls of an analysis of social solidarity trends: for example, the ratio of solidarity and anti-solidarity statements depends on the sampling design, i.e., tweet language, Twitter-user accounts' national identification (country known or unknown) and selection of relevant tweets. In our sample, the share of anti-solidarity tweets is higher in native (German) language tweets and among "anonymous" Twitter users writing in German compared to English-language tweets of users located in Germany.

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Acute anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with higher levels of everyday altruism

Cited by 20 publications

References 29 publications

Helping Behavior of Older Adults during the Early COVID-19 Lockdown in Belgium

Helping Behavior of Older Adults during the Early COVID-19 Lockdown in Belgium

COVID-19 Protective Behaviors Are Forms of Prosocial and Unselfish Behaviors

Measuring Social Solidarity During Crisis: The Role of Design Choices

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