Pro-social behaviour: helping and altruism
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Overview of the lecture
The lecture begins from the observation that the same post-communist transition that produced the anti-social phenomena treated in the previous lecture — anomie, relative deprivation, polarisation, and political violence — also produced the largest spontaneous humanitarian mobilisation in modern European history, the Polish civilian response to the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis. The argument running through the lecture is that the same social-psychological mechanisms underlie both anti-social and pro-social responses to structural shock, and that what differs is framing, targets, and institutional channels, not the underlying psychology.
The material is organised into five blocks. The first distinguishes pro-social behaviour from altruism proper and sets out a typology of motives that recurs through the later sections. The second surveys theoretical foundations, focusing on Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis and its parochial limits, with evolutionary and social-exchange accounts as supporting framework. The third treats the personal and situational determinants of helping, including a reading of Levine et al.’s 23-cities study that places Central and Eastern European (CEE) cities in the middle rather than at the bottom of the helping distribution. The fourth section examines pro-social behaviour in CEE as a puzzle — formal volunteering rates are low while informal helping is often high — and works through four country cases (Poland, Czechia, Hungary, the Baltic states) and a treatment of the 2022 Ukrainian refugee response. The fifth section returns to the social-psychological theories that best explain the observed patterns, closing with the observation that pro-social and anti-social responses run on a shared psychological substrate.
Theoretical foundations
The empathy-altruism hypothesis and its parochial limits
Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis holds that when people feel empathic concern for another person, they help for genuinely altruistic reasons — that is, for reasons oriented to the welfare of the other rather than to reduction of one’s own distress. Batson’s classic experimental design distinguishes empathic concern from personal distress, and shows that high-empathy participants help even when an “easy escape” option is available. Low-empathy or distress-dominated participants take the escape and leave the suffering other to someone else.
A recent quantitative synthesis of the empathy-altruism literature confirms that the core effect is robust, but moderated by three variables that matter for the CEE context. Similarity moderates the effect: empathy for similar others is stronger than empathy for dissimilar ones. The identifiable victim effect intensifies empathic concern when the target is a specific individual with a face and a story, and dilutes it when the target is a statistical abstraction. The distinction between empathic concern and empathic distress matters practically: concern motivates helping, distress motivates escape.
The moderators help explain why empathy alone is not enough for large-scale cross-boundary pro-sociality. Empathy is parochial by default: it fires most strongly for similar, identifiable, near-in-distance others. This is what Paul Bloom, in Against Empathy (2016), calls the “spotlight effect” of empathy: it illuminates one face brightly, at the cost of leaving other faces in darkness. Scaling empathy up to large, abstract, or culturally distant groups requires narrative and institutional scaffolding. The Polish response to Ukrainian women and children in 2022 is the clearest recent CEE example of empathy scaffolded by identity, media framing, and institutional readiness; the Polish response to Syrian men in 2015 is the clearest example of those scaffolds being absent.
Determinants of helping
Person and situation
On the person side, the altruistic personality (Eisenberg) is a stable disposition combining high agreeableness, high conscientiousness, internal locus of control, and high empathic concern, and it predicts helping across situations and time. The trait is real, but it explains less variance in actual helping than situational factors do. Gender differences are real but produce approximately equal totals: men more often perform heroic, one-off, risky helping (the chivalry frame), while women more often perform sustained, relational, care-based helping. Religion is correlated with formal charitable giving and in-group helping; its effect on out-group helping is mixed. In CEE, the Catholic Church in Poland and the Orthodox Church in Romania remain significant institutional mobilisers of charitable action.
On the situation side, the urban-rural distinction reflects Milgram’s urban-overload hypothesis: the sheer volume of stimuli in cities reduces attention to any one person’s need. Residential mobility matters: long-term residents help more than recent arrivals. The bystander effect (Latané and Darley, 1968) remains one of the most-cited findings in social psychology, and its three mechanisms — diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, evaluation apprehension — have been replicated many times and extended to online environments. Media effects are bidirectional: pro-social content produces short-term increases in helping, while dehumanising content produces short-term decreases. Media framing is therefore one of the principal channels by which institutional and narrative choices translate into pro-social or anti-social mobilisation.
The 23-cities study
Levine et al. (2001) observed helping rates in three standardised situations across 23 cities around the world: helping a man with a leg brace who drops a pile of magazines, pointing out a dropped pen, and helping a blind person across a busy intersection. The summary helping rates for selected cities are shown below.
| City | Helping rate |
|---|---|
| Rio de Janeiro | 93% |
| Vienna | 81% |
| Madrid | 79% |
| Copenhagen | 78% |
| Prague | 75% |
| Stockholm | 72% |
| Budapest | 71% |
| Bucharest | 69% |
| Rome | 63% |
| Sofia | 57% |
| Amsterdam | 54% |
| New York | 45% |
The key observation is that CEE cities sit in the middle of the distribution, not the helping deserts that the low formal-volunteering numbers would suggest. The variation within CEE (Prague 75% to Sofia 57%, a gap of 18 percentage points) is larger than the variation between CEE and Western Europe on average. This sharpens the analytical question: what explains the variation across CEE, and why does one kind of measurement (formal volunteering) make CEE look like a pro-sociality desert while another kind (stranger-helping in a public place) makes it look ordinary?
Country cases
Poland: from Solidarity to WOŚP to Ukrainian refugees
Poland’s pro-social history over the transition period traces a recognisable arc. Solidarity (1980) was a self-organising mass movement with explicit pro-social framing: workers organising to protect each other, intellectuals organising to support workers, a whole society engaged in reciprocal defence against the state. NGO legislation in 1989 provided the formal civic infrastructure for voluntary association. Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH) was founded in 1992 and became the country’s flagship international humanitarian NGO. WOŚP from 1993 onwards established the annual mass-participation charity model. The 2015 Syrian refugee crisis is the negative case: the Polish government refused to accept refugees, and the civic response was muted. The 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis reversed the 2015 pattern, with massive civic engagement.
The psychological signature of Poland’s pro-social capacity is that strong Catholic and national-identity resources can be activated when targets are framed as culturally close (“people like us”) and withheld when targets are framed as culturally distant. The institutional context (government, church, media) shapes which framing dominates, and the same country can therefore display very different pro-social behaviour in otherwise similar situations.
Czechia and Hungary
Czechia enjoys strong pre-communist civil society traditions (the Sokol movement, the interwar Red Cross, a dense pattern of associationalism) that communism suppressed but did not eradicate. The Velvet Revolution (1989) was a peaceful transition that minimised the cultural-trauma dynamics that obstructed civic rebuilding elsewhere. Notable Czech initiatives include People in Need (Člověk v tísni, 1992), a major humanitarian NGO combining domestic aid, international development, and independent journalism (One World Film Festival); the Memory of Nations project, a large oral-history archive of communist-era experiences; and the civic response to the September 2024 floods, which mobilised around 500 Red Cross volunteers and thousands of informal helpers. The psychological signature is comparatively lower learned helplessness, higher institutional trust, stronger associational habits — closer to the Western European pattern than any other CEE country.
Hungary combines a different mix. Kaláka, a pre-communist Carpathian-basin tradition of reciprocal labour (harvest, house-building), survived communism as a form of informal mutual aid. The One Percent Law (1996) allows Hungarian taxpayers to direct 1% of their income tax to a registered NGO, creating a standing fiscal channel for civic organisations. Hungarian Maltese Charity Service (Magyar Máltai Szeretetszolgálat) is the country’s major faith-based aid organisation, with significant programmes in Roma-integration work. The September 2024 floods provided a recent demonstration: Budapest mayor Karácsony distributed one million sandbags to residents, and new-party leader Péter Magyar joined volunteer flood defences. The psychological signature is strong informal helping within trusted networks, relatively weak formal volunteering.
The Baltic states: environment, minorities, and the Singing Revolution legacy
Estonia’s Teeme Ära (“Let’s Do It!”) began in 2008 as a nationwide one-day litter clean-up that mobilised approximately 50,000 participants (around 4% of the country’s population). The movement became an international model and has been UN-recognised. The psychological signature combines a civic-identity framing of environmental stewardship (cleaning Estonia is expressing Estonianness) with a ritual calendar and visible collective action.
Latvia and Lithuania draw on the collective memory of the Baltic Way (1989), the two-million-person human chain across the three Baltic countries, as a reference point for “solidarity as action”. The event is ritually re-enacted, and its memory is actively mobilised for contemporary civic initiatives. Russian-minority integration in Estonia and Latvia has become an important domain for contact-theory applications. Programmes in which Estonian and Russian-speaking teenagers do joint community projects have been shown to reduce prejudice and increase reported cross-group helping. As the empirical literature on contact theory predicts, quality of contact — living together, working together, children in the same schools — matters more than quantity.
The 2022 Ukrainian refugee response
What happened, and why Poland?
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By early March, over 2 million Ukrainians had crossed into Poland, and by mid-2022 more than 1.5 million remained in Poland alone. CBOS survey data from April 2022 show that 91% of Polish respondents agreed that Poland should accept Ukrainian refugees, and 63% reported that they personally had offered help (money, goods, volunteering, hosting). Hundreds of thousands of refugees were housed in private Polish homes rather than in camps. This was the largest spontaneous civilian mobilisation in post-communist CEE.
The Polish response combined several of the mechanisms set out earlier in this handout. Social identity was the central driver: Ukrainians were framed as “our” people — linguistically close, culturally similar, victims of a shared historical enemy (Russia). Polish national identity, under these conditions, included Ukrainians in the helping circle rather than excluding them. Existential threat added a second layer: the Russian invasion activated Polish historical memories (1939, 1944–5, 1981) that framed the conflict as continuous with earlier Polish experiences of Russian aggression. Reciprocity framing supplied a third layer: Polish media emphasised that Ukrainian workers had been contributing to the Polish economy since 2014. Empathy-altruism contributed in the form Batson’s framework predicts: the refugees who arrived in the first weeks were predominantly women with children, highly identifiable, highly empathisable. Institutional readiness supplied the final factor, in the form of Caritas Polska, Polish Humanitarian Action, and local NGOs with the capacity to absorb a sudden influx; the 2014–22 migration of Ukrainian workers had built informal networks of support.
Who helped, who did not, and the decline
Koc, Szczepanska, and colleagues (2024) analyse the personal and situational determinants of sustained helping — helping that continued beyond the first three months, when the initial mobilisation began to decline. The factors that predicted sustained helping were higher dispositional empathy, higher moral identity, pre-existing social ties to Ukrainians, lower right-wing authoritarianism, and lower collective narcissism.
The collective-narcissism finding deserves particular attention. Ordinary Polish national identification — pride in Poland, attachment to Polish symbols and history — promoted helping. Collective narcissism, an inflated and fragile form of group self-regard measured through items like “Poland deserves special treatment” and “other nations do not recognise Poland’s true greatness”, predicted belief in Russian narratives about Ukraine and reduced willingness to help. The same country, the same target group, and the same moment produced opposite pro-social outcomes depending on the kind of national identity a respondent held.
| Predictor | Effect on sustained helping |
|---|---|
| Dispositional empathy | Positive |
| Moral identity | Positive |
| Pre-existing Ukrainian ties | Positive |
| Ordinary national identification | Positive |
| Right-wing authoritarianism | Negative |
| Collective narcissism | Negative |
Szczepanska et al. (2024) document the decline of Polish willingness to help between March 2022 and February 2023. Attitudinal support declined slowly, from 91% to roughly 69% over the year. Behavioural engagement declined much faster, from 63% to 28%. The gap between attitudes and behaviour widened, as usually happens during mobilisation fatigue.
| Wave | Support for accepting refugees | Personally offered help |
|---|---|---|
| March 2022 | 91% | 63% |
| June 2022 | 83% | 50% |
| September 2022 | 78% | 41% |
| December 2022 | 73% | 33% |
| March 2023 | 69% | 28% |
The group-based emotions literature provides a mechanism for the decline. Szczepanska et al. find that all group-based emotions associated with the refugee response declined over the year — except guilt. Fear, sympathy, hope, and admiration all faded; guilt persisted. Guilt is the signature emotion of mobilisation fatigue: people who had helped but could not sustain the effort continued to feel that they should be helping, without converting the feeling into further action. The mobilisation cascade that sustained the initial response weakened as the crisis became “normal”, and the behaviour it had sustained weakened with it.
The case confirms social identity theory (in-group definition drives helping), empathy-altruism (identifiable victims mobilise), social learning (cascades of visible participation amplify themselves), and reciprocity framing (pre-existing ties matter). The case also complicates easy generalisations. The same institutional context that refused Syrians in 2015 accepted Ukrainians in 2022. The same national identity that fuels exclusion in some contexts fuels helping in others. Collective narcissism and ordinary identification, which look superficially similar, produce opposite effects. The story is not that Poles are hospitable or xenophobic. It is that Polish national identity is a resource that can be activated in either direction, depending on how the target group is framed and on which variant of national identification is dominant in a given moment.
Theories that travel to CEE
Identity, learning, and contact
Social identity theory holds that people help in-group members to enhance the status of the groups they belong to and, through that, their own self-esteem. In CEE, the transition shifted the salient identity from the class categories of communism to the national and ethnic categories of the post-1989 period, and helping behaviour followed. Social identity theory has two faces in the region: it promotes helping within the redefined in-group (as in WOŚP, Estonian Teeme Ära, and the 2022 Ukrainian response), and it limits helping across ethnic, religious, or sexual-orientation lines (as in the treatment of Roma across the region, in the rejection of Syrian refugees in 2015, and in sporadic anti-LGBTQ violence). The decisive question in any given moment is how wide or narrow the in-group is drawn — and who is doing the drawing.
Social learning theory (Bandura) holds that people learn pro-social behaviour by observing others being rewarded for it. In CEE, the rise of visible local role models matters more than imported Western exemplars: Polish entrepreneurs who publicly donated to WOŚP, Czech oligarchs who funded educational charities, Romanian civil-society leaders who demonstrated effective volunteering. Media effects fit the same framework: pro-social media (flood coverage, Ukrainian refugee reporting) produce measurable short-term surges in helping. The mechanism is social learning via imitation. The limitation is that it is value-neutral: the same process that spreads helping can spread hostility to helping, depending on which models dominate the media environment.
Contact theory (Allport) holds that positive, equal-status, cooperative contact between groups reduces prejudice and increases pro-sociality across the group boundary. In CEE, contact theory has been applied most successfully to Estonian-Russian integration programmes in schools, German-Polish reconciliation projects, and Hungarian-Romanian cultural exchange. The 2022 refugee experience extended the evidence base: contact with Ukrainian women and children in Polish schools and workplaces produced large and durable reductions in anti-Ukrainian prejudice. Quality of contact — living together, working together, children in the same schools — mattered more than quantity. The limitation is that contact with some out-groups has not produced the same effect: contact with Roma communities in Hungary and Slovakia has not generally produced the predicted prejudice reduction, because the contact is rarely equal-status. Contact theory needs scaffolding from identity framing to work; it is not a stand-alone intervention.
Memory, trust, and learned helplessness
Collective memory theory holds that shared narratives about past cooperation motivate present helping. The Baltic Way (1989) is ritually re-enacted; the memory is itself the mobilising device. The Polish 1980 Solidarity movement is a reference template in Polish civic discourse for “people helping each other change things”. Czech Charter 77 is a template for small numbers of helpers making a difference. These memories are not simply commemorative; they are actively deployed in contemporary civic mobilisations.
Learned helplessness (Seligman) holds that repeated exposure to situations one cannot control produces generalised passivity — the belief that action is futile. The communist legacy included pervasive political learned helplessness, documented in 1990s survey data. Post-2000 reversals in several CEE countries — Slovak village-renewal programmes, Lithuanian neighbourhood committees, Czech anti-corruption mobilisation between 2017 and 2022 — broke the helplessness cycle by demonstrating that action can change outcomes. Pro-social behaviour and perceived self-efficacy are reciprocally causal: helping that visibly works increases people’s belief that they can help, which produces more helping.
Social capital theory (Putnam) holds that networks and trust enable cooperation. In CEE, countries with higher pre-existing social capital (Slovenia, Czech Republic) showed higher formal volunteering. Countries with lower institutional trust relied more on informal, particularistic networks. The 2022 Ukrainian refugee response provides a partial exception: low institutional trust did not prevent mass helping, because helping ran through informal networks and self-organised initiatives rather than NGOs. Informal social capital was sufficient; formal social capital was not required. The episode is a reminder that the measurement of “social capital” through formal-associational indicators undercounts the resources available in societies where informal networks carry most of the pro-social load.
The dual nature of transition
The anti-social chain traced in the previous lecture and the pro-social chain traced in this lecture run on largely the same psychological machinery. Social identity drives both in-group helping and out-group exclusion. Relative deprivation drives both anti-elite aggression (Solidarity, the Romanian anti-corruption movements, the Czech 2017–22 mobilisations) and cooperative mobilisation against inequality. Social learning spreads both helping cascades and hostility cascades. Collective memory can be used to frame either solidarity or enmity. Empathy is parochial, but parochial in a direction determined by how the in-group is drawn.
The implication is that CEE’s post-1989 transition is the most compressed natural experiment in modern European social psychology. It produced the anti-social chain (anomie, nostalgia, polarisation, violence) and the pro-social chain (identity-based helping, mass mobilisation, volunteering growth, humanitarian response), and both run on the same psychological substrate. The question that matters for policy and practice is not which chain is “natural” or “fundamental”, because both are equally available. The question is what institutional and narrative choices channel the underlying psychology toward pro-sociality rather than anti-sociality. This is the open question the lecture leaves with the literature.
Conclusions
Pro-social behaviour in CEE looks weaker than it is when measured only through formal volunteering. Informal helping, measured through stranger-helping experiments, Eurostat informal-helping items, and country-specific evidence, is often stronger than Western European averages. The theories that best travel to CEE are social identity, empathy-altruism with the identifiable-victim caveat, social learning, contact theory, and collective memory. The 2022 Ukrainian refugee response demonstrated that CEE societies are capable of massive, spontaneous pro-social mobilisation when identity, empathy, reciprocity, and institutional readiness align. The response also faded, as predicted by models of mobilisation fatigue and as recorded in the decline of all group-based emotions except guilt.
The most practically important empirical finding of the recent literature is that ordinary national identification and collective narcissism have opposite effects on pro-sociality, despite looking superficially similar. The distinction matters because it identifies a specific, targetable variable: the kind of national identification that a political or media ecosystem cultivates determines whether national sentiment produces helping or exclusion. The same material on which populist movements draw for exclusionary mobilisation can, under different narrative framing, produce mass pro-social mobilisation.
Questions for discussion
- If pro-social and anti-social behaviour run on the same psychological mechanisms, what institutional or narrative interventions can tilt the balance toward pro-sociality without requiring a change in the underlying psychology?
- The Polish 2022 response was possible partly because Ukrainians were framed as “one of us”. What would it take to widen the in-group to include groups currently framed as “other” — Roma, Muslim refugees, LGBTQ+ minorities?
- Guilt was the one group-based emotion that persisted when all others faded during the decline phase of the Polish response. Is guilt a sustainable basis for pro-social behaviour, or does it tend to produce backlash over time?
- Formal volunteering is low in CEE for reasons that run back to communist-era coercion and post-1989 institutional thinness. Is there value in trying to raise formal rates, or is the informal pattern a feature (dense, responsive, trust-based) rather than a bug?
- Collective narcissism and ordinary national identification have opposite effects on pro-sociality. If this distinction is politically actionable, who is in a position to act on it, and what would such action look like in practice?