Understanding prosocial and antisocial behaviours: The roles of self‐focused and other‐focused motivational orientations

Abstract We examine how individual differences in self‐focused and other‐focused orientations relate to prosocial (e.g., helping, volunteerism) and antisocial (e.g., theft, violence) behaviours/attitudes. Using four datasets (total N = 176,216; across 78 countries), we find that other‐focused orientations (e.g., socially focused values, intimacy motivation, compassionate/communal traits) generally relate positively to prosocial outcomes and negatively to antisocial outcomes. These effects are highly consistent cross‐nationally and across multiple ways of operationalizing constructs. In contrast, self‐focused orientations (e.g., personally focused values, power motivation, assertive/agentic traits) tend to relate positively to both antisocial and prosocial outcomes. However, associations with prosocial outcomes vary substantially across nations and construct operationalizations. Overall, the effects of other‐focused orientations are consistently larger than those of self‐focused orientations. We discuss the implications of these findings for interventions that target self‐focused and other‐focused motivations to influence prosocial and antisocial outcomes.