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

• Main Author: Goh, Pamela
• Other Authors: Setoh Pei Pei
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/165795
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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 eminently limited empirically-driven answers to explain if people are naturally prosocial or proself during such settings. The purpose of the present dissertation is to thus understand whether victims are inclined to behave prosocially or in a proself manner when confronted with an agentic threat. It was predicted that perceived agency would reduce prosociality in people, and the reason for this relationship is due to the mediating effect of perceived threat. Four studies in total were conducted to elucidate the effect of perceived agency on behavioural responses. Studies 1 and 2 employed the use of vignettes, whereby participants repeatedly rated their perceptions and behavioural inclinations as a crisis transpired. These vignettes reflected a vehicle crisis but were differentiated based on the single, main variable of attributions of agency, offering a direct comparison and thus evidence on how agentic crises alter prosociality in people. Study 1 found that perceived agency intensified both perceived threat and proself inclination, through which perceived threat was a mediator between both variables. To determine if there was a causal effect of agency on behavioural inclinations, vignette study 2 was conducted with a manipulation of agency. Based on comparisons between an agentic and non-agentic crisis scenario, perceived threat and proself inclination were indeed significantly higher in the former than latter condition, to which perceived threat continued to serve as a mediator between agency and proself inclination. Meanwhile, studies 3 and 4 employed the use of a computer crisis simulation program as a more direct and implicit measurement of behavioural inclinations during a time-critical, crisis situation. In this simulation, participants decided if they were to help or push/ignore avatars as they try to successfully evacuate out of a subway station. Complementing earlier findings was study 3 which revealed that participants exhibited more helping decisions in the simulation when they perceived the crisis to be clearly non-agentic (relative to being ambiguous) in nature. Evidently prosocial tendencies are more likely in situations whereby there was an evident absence of a malicious intent to strike and harm people. While perceived threat was not a mediator between agency and behavioural inclinations, attributions of agency still had a direct effect on prosociality. To determine if there was a causal effect of agency on behavioural inclinations in the simulation, there was a manipulation of agency in study 4. Based on comparisons between an agentic, ambiguous, and non-agentic crisis scenario, there were no significant differences between actual pushing or helping behaviours in the simulation. However, participants tended to report engaging in higher levels of pushing behaviours during the simulation, in the agentic than non-agentic condition. The present dissertation highlighted the critical role of influence that attributions of agency have on proself tendencies, including the increase in people’s threat perceptions as well. Overall, these four studies provided empirical evidence for reduced prosociality when a crisis is perceived to be agentic. People tend to be proself in the face of uncertain and extreme danger, one in which harm is seen to be deliberately inflicted by a malevolent individual. Threat experiences after all are detrimentally amplified, which partly serve to explain why maintaining’s one own welfare can be more preferred when confronted with agentic threats. While agentic crises tended to generate proself responses in victims, critically, prosocial behaviours are more likely to manifest only when victims perceived the event to be non-agentic. Evidently, victims’ behavioural reactions to a crisis are defined by their perceptions of their surroundings; the likelihood and nature of individual responses to any given circumstance are conditioned according to their external interpretation of the event. That is not to say that people are completely selfish and unhelpful, although concurrently it is not feasible to expect a considerable extent of prosociality in humans universally across all detrimental scenarios. The more threatening and agentic a crisis is, the more external or formal assistance will victims need. The current dissertation accentuates the importance and relevance of examining how people’s emotional and cognitive interpretation of an external event inform their eventual behavioural inclinations to act.