Social Cohesion and Outgroup Prosocial Behaviors
Intergroup prosocial behaviors, such as immigrants helping nationals, contribute to improving intergroup relations and strengthening social cohesion. However, people might not attribute genuine prosocial motives to a potential helper when negative intergroup perceptions and expectations shape these relations. The present blog describes research investigating factors that influence help-recipients’ understanding of intergroup prosocial behaviors.
Social cohesion can be considered as a complex social process aiming to consolidate relations between different social groups, namely by developing a way of solidarity (i.e., sharing resources) and connectedness (i.e., sense of belonging) between them. However, social cohesion is often challenged when relations between different social groups are shaped by prejudice and distrust. In these contexts, encouraging intergroup prosocial behaviors (e.g., when immigrants aim at helping nationals) could be one effective way to foster social cohesion to the extent that it constitutes an excellent opportunity to increase intergroup knowledge, trust, and positive relations.
However, the promotion of intergroup prosocial behaviors not only represents a challenge in itself, but the correct understanding of these behaviors also cannot be taken for granted either. Indeed, help-recipients are not always willing to accept the help nor to attribute prosocial motives to someone belonging to another group (an outgroup) because they suspect that suspicious, ulterior reasons motivate the offer to help. Unfortunately, this can happen even when prosocial behaviors are genuinely motivated, or when help-recipients would personally or collectively benefit from the help.
Negative Intergroup Expectations and Prosocial Behaviors
Understanding intergroup prosocial behaviors as genuinely motivated requires attributing human qualities to the helper, and even to the helper’s group. For instance, help-recipients should be able to believe that outgroup members can feel empathy towards them, and that they are altruistically motivated to help. However, it is quite difficult for this to happen when negative intergroup expectations shape these relations (e.g., when people have negative beliefs about the outgroup, and when they anticipate negative behaviors from the outgroup towards the ingroup).
Indeed, individuals always display more positive beliefs, feelings, and behaviors towards ingroup members (i.e., those with whom they share similar personal characteristics, such as nationality or religion) than towards outgroup members (i.e., those with whom they do not share relevant characteristics). For instance, nationals often show more empathy and altruistic motives towards ingroup members than towards immigrants. Similarly, nationals also anticipate that their fellow native, as compared to immigrants, will show more empathy and altruistic intentions towards them. Thus, when intergroup relations are shaped, for instance, by ignorance, mistrust, or hostility, the negative intergroup expectations often inhibit the possibility of attributing genuine prosocial motives (i.e., empathic and altruistic concerns) to an outgroup helper, which might ultimately reduce social cohesion.
Factors Fostering People’s Positive Understanding of Prosocial Behaviors
Our research has focused on nationals’ understanding of help offered by migrants or social, ethnic minorities. In these experiments, in general, nationals are asked to imagine themselves in a predicament (being in a difficult situation), and that an unknown person offered to help them. We created two conditions as a function of the helper group membership: the potential helper was either an ingroup member (another national) or an outgroup member (a migrant or a member of an ethnic minority). The main results show that nationals attribute less empathy and altruism (prosocial motives) to an outgroup helper than to an ingroup helper, and are also less willing to accept help from the former than from the latter.
Our research has also investigated the role of different factors that might strengthen or diminish negative intergroup expectations and, therefore, people’s understanding and reaction to intergroup prosocial behaviors. First, we provide evidence that the main results appear in particular among highly prejudiced nationals (i.e., those who have more negative intergroup expectations). Second, we also show that this effect appears specifically when the situation takes place in the nationals’ own city/country (i.e., a context that is familiar to them), in which the outgroup helper was actually an immigrant or a member of an ethnic minority in mobility, and therefore was perceived as less able to help. However, nationals acknowledged to a greater extent the ability of this potential outgroup helper to help when the situation took place in the helper’s country or region (i.e., when nationals are in mobility, and they needed help outside their familiar/comfort zone). In addition, we also observed that this phenomenon is shaped not only by ingroup norms (people’s perception of their fellow nationals’ opinions and reactions towards the outgroup), but also by their perception of outgroup norms (e.g., whether the outgroup attributes human qualities to nationals and respects their moral integrity). Finally, our findings also show that these factors are consequential regarding nationals’ willingness to accept help and to have intergroup interactions in the future.
In conclusion, improving the conditions under which prosocial intergroup behaviors are actually understood, as motivated by prosocial motives, might improve social cohesion within diverse societies. The results of our research suggest that actions helping nationals to perceive immigrants, as genuinely motivated to help, might strengthen social cohesion between groups and increase intergroup solidarity.
Islam Borinca is a doctoral student at the University of Geneva. Juan M. Falomir-Pichastor is a Professor at the University of Geneva. They are associated with the nccr – on the move in the project on Societal norms among national majorities and immigrants.
List of collaborators: Luca Andrighetto, Federica Durante, Eva Green, Samer Halabi, Linda Tropp, Nana Ofosu, Jacques Berent, Giulia Valsecchi and Matthieu Vétois
