The role of higher education and civic involvement in converting young adults' social responsibility to prosocial behavior

Abstract

This study investigates the indirect mechanisms relevant to converting young adults' prosocial attitudes and individual responsibility into their prosocial behavior. Our results are based on a sample of 530 young adults studying at three public regional business schools in South East Europe. They show a significant favorable influence on young adults' civic and political involvement, mediating the relationship between individual responsibility attitudes and prosocial behavior. However, this would not have been expected based on previous research. Another indirect path between the same variables is modeled using a hypothesized moderated mediation effect. The institutional influence of higher education proves to be a significant mediator of the proposed relationship, moderated by the amount of educational content in the fields of ethics, social and environmental responsibility. At mid-and-high levels of exposure to relevant educational content, this indirect path significantly influences the developing young adults' pro-environmental behaviors. The study results are discussed from the viewpoint of peripheral regions with a history of dysfunctional social capital mechanisms.

Exploration of Altruistic Behavior in Early Adult Volunteers: A Phenomenological Study

“…This aligns with the social life in society, synonymous with mutual assistance behaviors (Masroni et al, 2023;Windmann et al, 2024). This helping behavior in social psychology is known as altruistic behavior, prioritizing others' interests to alleviate their suffering and enhance well-being without expecting anything in return for the act (Alfirević et al, 2023;Battu & Rahwan, 2023;Gamble et al, 2023). The desire to help often arises when faced with the suffering of others, compelling individuals to alleviate such distress (Hierro et al, 2023;Ferschmann et al, 2024).…”

How personal values follow the societal lockdown due to COVID-19: Case of business students in Slovenia

“…On the contrary, the importance of conservation values has decreased, which indicates the tiredness of students with restrictions during the time of COVID-19 and the desire of students to act more freely and live with less orders, selfrestriction, and preservation of the past. In comparison with the period before the crisis, only self-transcendence values remained unchanged, as these are to the greatest extent defined by the dominant behavioral orientation of students in universalisms and benevolence as typical characteristics young adults and especially Generation Z (Nedelko et al, 2022;Alfirević et al, 2023).…”

“…Sampled individuals according to developmental stage theories belong to young adults as a social group aged 18 to 25 years, in the phase following adolescence (Erikson, 1975;Levinson, 1986). According to Generation theory sampled students belongs to Generation Z (Newman and Newman, 2012;Dimock, 2019) as individuals born between the mid to late 1990s and early 2010s (Newman and Newman, 2012;Dimock, 2019;Alfirević et al, 2023). In Europe, young adults from Generation Z represent most of students' populations, young adults comprise 13% of the active working population, while members of Generations Z represent more than 22% of the total EU population (Scholtz and Rennig, 2019;Gomez et al, 2020).…”

“…The behavioral characteristics of current business students reflect the general behavior of young adults from Generation Z which literature describes as digital individuals living and breathing through virtual connection, caring for the common good, and believing that everyone has the right to be what they want in their lives (Deal et al, 2010;Gomez et al, 2020;Alfirević et al, 2023). However, their comparison with past young adults' behavior is difficult, since most of the past research was conducted with diverse samples of respondents (Tormos et al, 2017;Schuster et al, 2019;Leijen et al, 2022) and mainly in favorable societal and situational circumstances (Sortheix et al, 2019;Grasso et al, 2021).…”

“…This study has the following limitations. The central constraint is that the focus was on one social cohort of business students from one cultural cluster belonging to young adults from Generation Z to avoid possible divergence in the values (Tormos et al, 2017;Nedelko et al, 2022;Alfirević et al, 2023) and the importance and hierarchy of values between generations (Bardi et al, 2014;Vecchione et al, 2016). This limits the generalization of the results to the whole population of young adults and older generations, although the key insights could also be applied to current population of young adults, with appropriate critical judgment.…”