The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition: 1989–2019

Pro-social behaviour: helping and altruism

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

April 30, 2026

Today’s topics

Overview of today’s lecture

  • Pro-social behaviour as the other half of the trauma-of-transition story
  • Definitions and motives: instrumental help, reciprocity, genuine altruism
  • Theory: empathy-altruism, social identity, social learning
  • The CEE puzzle: low formal volunteering, high informal helping
  • Country cases: Poland, Czechia, Hungary, the Baltics
  • The 2022 Ukrainian refugee response: what we can and cannot read from it
  • The same psychological machinery produces both anti- and pro-social outcomes

Why pro-social behaviour, after anomie and aggression?

  • Last week: precarity → anomie → polarisation → anti-social behaviour.
  • But the same transition produced the largest spontaneous humanitarian mobilisation in modern European history (Poland 2022–2023).
  • Two questions today:
    • Are the mechanisms that produce pro-social behaviour the same mechanisms (in-group identity, relative deprivation, social learning) that sometimes produce anti-social behaviour, differently channelled?
    • Why is formal volunteering persistently low in CEE while informal helping is often higher than in the West?

What is pro-social behaviour?

Definitions and a working typology

  • Pro-social behaviour — any action intended to benefit another, regardless of motive.
  • Altruism — a subset: action to benefit another with no expectation of reward and at some cost to oneself.
  • Most real helping is mixed: self-interested, norm-driven, emotion-driven, identity-driven.
Motive What triggers it What breaks it
Kin / reciprocity Relatedness; expected return Strangers, no return path
Social exchange Reward > cost Costs rise sharply
Empathy-altruism Vivid suffering of an identifiable other Distance, abstraction
Norm / identity “People like us help” Identity threat, out-group framing
Moral / existential Values, faith Cynicism, burnout

Theoretical foundations

Empathy-altruism, and why empathy is not enough

  • Batson: when people feel empathic concern, they help for genuinely altruistic reasons — not just to escape their own distress.
  • The link is robust but moderated by similarity, the identifiable-victim effect, and the distinction between empathic concern and empathic distress.
  • Bloom (2016): empathy is parochial — strongest for similar, identifiable, near-in-distance others. It biases us toward the in-group and away from abstract justice.
  • The CEE pattern fits exactly:
    • Ukrainian women with children: highly empathised, highly helped (2022)
    • Syrian men 2015–16: much less empathised, often actively resisted
  • Empathy + in-group framing = strong helping. Empathy alone = weak helping.

Evolution, exchange, and the CEE twist

  • Kin selection (Hamilton), reciprocal altruism (Trivers), indirect reciprocity / reputation (Nowak): the evolutionary scaffolding for helping.
  • Social exchange: people help when rewards (reciprocity, reputation, “warm glow”) exceed costs (time, money, risk, social disapproval).
  • CEE application: in the 1990s, when formal institutions were weak, dense reciprocal networks (Hungarian kaláka, Polish załatwić sprawy) substituted for markets and state.
  • They solved concrete problems — but also crowded out impersonal pro-social behaviour. You helped your people; strangers were not your problem.

Determinants of helping

Person and situation

  • Personal: the “altruistic personality” (Eisenberg) — agreeableness, internal locus of control, empathic concern. Religion correlates with formal giving and in-group helping; out-group effects are mixed.
  • Gender: men do more heroic one-off helping; women do more sustained, relational helping. Totals are similar; the type differs.
  • Situational:
    • Urban overload (Milgram): cities reduce attention to any one need
    • Residential mobility: stable communities help more
    • Bystander effect (Latané & Darley): diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, evaluation apprehension

The 23-cities study: helping in CEE in context

City Helping rate
Rio de Janeiro 93%
Vienna 81%
Prague 75%
Budapest 71%
Bucharest 69%
Rome 63%
Sofia 57%
Amsterdam 54%
New York 45%
  • CEE cities sit in the middle, not the helping deserts that low formal-volunteering numbers would suggest.
  • Variation within CEE (Prague vs. Sofia: 18 points) is larger than the variation between CEE and Western Europe on average.

Pro-social behaviour in CEE

The CEE puzzle

  • On formal volunteering (Eurostat, CAF World Giving Index), CEE is below Western and Northern Europe:
    • Netherlands, Sweden, Finland: 35–45%
    • Poland, Slovenia: 15–20%
    • Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary: 5–10%
  • But on informal helping (neighbours, friends, family, strangers outside organisations), Poland ranks above the EU average, and several CEE countries outscore Portugal, Italy, Greece.
  • Same populations: generous through one lens, stingy through another.

Why the gap?

  • Historical: communist regimes compelled “voluntary” labour (subotniki). Formal volunteering still carries a faint taint of coercion.
  • Institutional: NGO infrastructure developed late and unevenly after 1989. Without organisations to channel it, would-be volunteering stays informal.
  • Trust: low institutional trust → citizens prefer to help through people they know, not organisations they don’t.
  • Measurement: standard surveys miss the dense lattice of favour networks, neighbour-minding, and elderly-parent care that actually sustains CEE life.

The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOŚP)

  • Founded 1993 by Jerzy Owsiak. A one-day annual fundraiser for paediatric medical equipment.
  • 33rd edition (January 2025): over €42 million in its first days; lifetime total ~PLN 2.3 billion (~€540m); over 74,500 pieces of medical equipment to Polish hospitals.
  • Psychological signature: collective identity (“this is what Poles do in January”) + ritual calendar + visible reciprocity + a charismatic (and polarising) entrepreneur.
  • Shows that low formal-volunteering rates coexist with high-intensity episodic pro-sociality mobilised around shared identity and ritual.

Country cases

Poland: from Solidarity to WOŚP to Ukrainian refugees

  • Historical arc: Solidarity (1980) → NGO law (1989) → Polish Humanitarian Action (1992) → WOŚP (1993–) → 2015 Syrian refusal → 2022 Ukrainian mobilisation.
  • Psychological signature: strong Catholic and national-identity resources, activated when targets are framed as “close to us” (Ukrainians), withheld when targets are framed as culturally distant (Syrians).

Czechia and Hungary

  • Czechia — pre-communist civic traditions (Sokol, Red Cross) that communism suppressed but did not eradicate; Velvet transition minimised trauma. People in Need (1992), Memory of Nations, ~500 Red Cross volunteers in the September 2024 floods. Lower learned helplessness, higher institutional trust — closest of any CEE country to the Western pattern.
  • Hungary — kaláka (reciprocal Carpathian-basin labour) survived communism as informal mutual aid. One Percent Law (1996): taxpayers can direct 1% of income tax to an NGO. Hungarian Maltese Charity Service is a major faith-based aid actor (incl. Roma integration). 2024 floods: Karácsony distributed 1m sandbags; Magyar joined volunteer defences.

The Baltics: environment, minorities, memory

  • Estonia — Teeme Ära (“Let’s Do It!”, 2008): nationwide one-day litter clean-up, ~50,000 participants (4% of population). Became an international UN-recognised model.
  • Baltic Way (1989): 2 million people holding hands across three countries. Remains a reference point for solidarity as action.
  • Russian-minority integration: Estonian-Russian joint school projects are contact theory in practice. Quality of contact matters more than quantity.
  • Psychological signature: collective memory of resistance provides narrative infrastructure for present pro-sociality; environment is framed as national inheritance to be defended civically.

The 2022 Ukrainian refugee response

What actually happened

  • 24 February 2022 — full-scale Russian invasion. By early March, 2 million+ Ukrainians in Poland; mid-2022, 1.5 million+ still there.
  • In Poland (CBOS, April 2022):
    • 91% agreed Poland should accept Ukrainian refugees
    • 63% reported personally offering help
    • Hundreds of thousands housed in private Polish homes, not camps
  • The largest spontaneous civilian mobilisation in post-communist CEE.

Why Poland? Identity first, empathy second

  • Social identity: Ukrainians framed as “our” people — linguistically close, victims of a shared historical enemy (Russia). Polish national identity included Ukrainians in the helping circle.
  • Existential threat: invasion triggered Polish memories of 1939, 1944–5,
    1. Helping Ukrainians = helping “us” by helping “them who are fighting Russia for us”.
  • Reciprocity: media emphasised pre-2022 Ukrainian labour in Poland.
  • Empathy-altruism: women and children — highly identifiable victims.
  • Institutional readiness: Caritas, PAH, local NGOs and the 2014–22 labour migration had built capacity and informal networks.

Who helped, who didn’t — and the decline

  • Koc et al. (2024): sustained helping was predicted by higher empathy, higher moral identity, pre-existing ties — and lower right-wing authoritarianism and lower collective narcissism.
  • Ordinary national identification promoted helping; collective narcissism predicted Russian-narrative belief and reduced helping. Same country, same moment, opposite outcomes.
  • Szczepanska et al. (2024): all group-based emotions declined except guilt. Guilt is the signature emotion of mobilisation fatigue.

Theories that travel to CEE

Identity, learning, and contact

  • Social identity theory: people help in-group members to enhance group status and self-esteem.
    • Promotes: WOŚP, Teeme Ära, 2022 Ukrainian response
    • Limits: Roma exclusion, 2015 Syrian rejection
    • The decisive question is how widely the in-group is drawn.
  • Social learning: visible local role models matter more than imported Western exemplars. Pro-social media → short-term helping surges. Caveat: social learning is value-neutral — it spreads hostility just as readily.
  • Contact theory (Allport): positive, equal-status, cooperative contact reduces prejudice. 2022 Polish-Ukrainian co-habitation produced large, durable drops in anti-Ukrainian prejudice. But contact with Roma in Hungary and Black/Arab migrants in Poland has not. Contact needs identity-framing scaffolding to work.

Memory, trust, and learned helplessness

  • Collective memory: shared narratives of past cooperation motivate present helping — Baltic Way, Solidarity, Charter 77.
  • Learned helplessness (Seligman) was the communist legacy. Successful local projects (Slovak village renewal, Czech anti-corruption mobilisation 2017–22) broke the cycle by demonstrating action can change outcomes. Helping and self-efficacy are reciprocally causal.
  • Social capital (Putnam): trust + networks = capacity to cooperate. Higher pre-existing social capital (Slovenia, Czechia) → higher formal volunteering. 2022 is a partial exception: low institutional trust did not prevent mass helping, because helping ran through informal networks. Informal social capital was sufficient; formal was not required.

System justification: pro-social ≠ progressive

  • Core claim (Jost): people defend the system they live under — even against evidence of unfairness — to satisfy a need for stability.
  • Pro-social initiatives sometimes serve preservation as much as change: Czech educational volunteering preserved public-school quality through privatisation; Hungarian kaláka preserved mutual aid through market transition.
  • The same behaviour can be resistance (defending something valued against erosion) or conservatism (defending something comfortable against reform).
  • Pro-social behaviour does not automatically drive progressive change. It can stabilise the status quo.

The dual nature of transition

Anti-social and pro-social run on the same mechanisms

  • Last week: precarity → anomie → relative deprivation → polarisation → anti-social behaviour.
  • This week: shared identity → empathy → social learning → cooperation → pro-social behaviour.
  • Most of the psychological machinery is the same:
    • Social identity drives both in-group helping and out-group exclusion
    • Relative deprivation drives both anti-elite aggression and cooperative mobilisation against inequality
    • Social learning spreads helping cascades and hostility cascades alike
    • Collective memory can frame either solidarity or enmity
  • What differs is framing, targets, and institutional channels, not the underlying psychology. The course’s signature insight: the question for policy is which channels we build.

Conclusions

What we have learned

  • CEE pro-social behaviour looks weaker than it is when measured only through formal volunteering. Informal helping is often stronger than Western averages.
  • The theories that travel best to CEE: social identity, empathy-altruism (with the identifiable-victim caveat), social learning, contact theory, collective memory.
  • 2022 demonstrated that CEE societies can mount massive, spontaneous pro-social mobilisation when identity, empathy, reciprocity, and institutional readiness align — and that the response fades as group-based emotions other than guilt fade.
  • Ordinary national identification and collective narcissism have opposite effects on pro-sociality, despite looking similar on the surface. The most practically useful empirical finding of the recent literature.

Questions for discussion

  • If pro- and anti-social behaviour run on the same psychological mechanisms, what institutional or narrative interventions can tilt the balance toward pro-sociality without changing the underlying psychology?
  • The Polish 2022 response worked 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. Is guilt a sustainable basis for pro-sociality, or does it tend to produce backlash?
  • Is low formal volunteering a bug (worth raising) or a feature (a dense, responsive, trust-based informal pattern)?