The effects of perceptions of a malicious intent to harm on victims' prosocial intentions during a crisis

Abstract

Extensive research has been dedicated to the field of crowd psychology during crises. Different factors were established for why people help or not help others despite being confronted with danger, where improving the well-being of others may come with an expense to one's own welfare. When victims are in peril, bystander action can be imperative and transform the crisis trajectory.A substantial and fundamental, but also highly unascertained, determinant of prosociality is the underlying cause of the crisis⎯that is, whether the event is agentic or non-agentic in nature. Agency here reflects the presence of malice, deliberate decision, and intent by someone to impose harm and fear onto people. Agentic crises are thus those that emerge from some degree of malicious human intent, e.g., terror attacks and mass conflicts. Non-agentic threats are those that occurred as a result of other reasons apart from human intentions, e.g., natural disasters and vehicle accidents.Attribution of agency behind a crisis seemingly promotes proself inclinations in people; with reference to various concepts such as anthropomorphism, protection motivation theory, and the use of heuristics to interpret a situation, reasons for this tendency could be on part of the amplification of pain and threat perceptions arising from perceived agency. The actions of harm-doers after all are packed with animosity and intentionality, reflecting someone's malevolent desire to inflict and maximise harm on people as best as they could.Nonetheless, prosociality has also been observed in times of agentic threats, and reconciling these conflicting facts in reality is challenging. There still exists an