Helping Ukrainian war refugees in Poland: The emergence of a political assemblage

Abstract Prosocial collective action has been abundantly theorized across political and social science. Related scholarship tends to focus mostly on attitudes or intentions, and less often on actual behaviors. Moreover, emphasis is placed on individual prosocial acts and their aggregation rather than on conceptions of collective, nonreducible phenomena. In this study, we invoke metatheoretical systems thinking to examine more closely the emergence of political assemblages. Drawing on collective action and cultural psychology literature, we argue that in the aftermath of the Russian invasion, a unique climate (assemblage) of solidarity was created in Poland, one conducive to helping, constitutive of affective, discursive, axiological, ideological, and cultural components. The results of latent SEM provide evidence for excellent fit (robust CFI = .986) of the non‐recursive model (hypothesizing a reciprocal relationship between helping and affect) to the data from a nationwide sample of participants ( N = 1034). The model tested as invariant across three groups of participant‐helpers: (1) housing refugees, (2) volunteers, and (3) those helping indirectly. However, differences were found among these groups suggesting that the motivations for helping and the mechanisms involved were varied. Overall, the research highlights the centrality and reciprocity of affect in collective prosociality, as well as its axiological directionality through humanism, with political orientation serving a complementary mediating role.