How Perceptions of Those Who Help and Seek Help Are Shaped by Relational Context

We report four studies focusing on judgments about another person’s altruism, selfishness, and well-adjusted nature based on their helping and help-seeking behavior in relational context. In all studies, the relationship depicted was manipulated to be either normatively communal or normatively transactional. In Studies 1-3, participants judged helpers as less altruistic when helping communal partners than when providing exactly the same help to transactional ones, and they judged non-helpers as more selfish when failing to help a communal partner than when failing to provide the same help to a transactional partner. In Study 4, participants judged targets who asked for help from communal partners as more well-adjusted than those who resisted asking for the same help, and the reverse was true in transactional contexts. All studies supported our hypothesis that lay individuals attribute traits to others based both on their behaviors and the relational context in which those behaviors occur.