Prosocial behavior is suggested to be a central feature of human life, yet it remains debated whether people possess a general intuitive tendency to act prosocially, and to what extent such intuitions are shaped by social experience, as proposed by the Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH). The present research examined how social environments influence intuitive prosocial behavior. In two studies (total N = 300), social experience was manipulated using an autobiographical recall task and a news-reading procedure. Consistent with SHH, environments promoting prosociality increased helping behavior under intuitive conditions, whereas this effect was attenuated under deliberative processing. Moreover, views of humanity emerged as a key cognitive mechanism linking social experience to helping behavior. This research extends SHH to the domain of helping, examining multiple types of experience induction, and identifying views of humanity as a mediating mechanism. • Prosocial environments increase helping behavior under intuitive processing. • Deliberative processing attenuates the effect of social experience on helping. • Views of humanity mediate the link between social experience and helping. • Intuitive prosociality is shaped by direct and vicarious social experiences.
Shi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.