People want to help each other, even when it costs them something, and even when the Motivations to help don't always align, a new Study suggests. Phys.Org reports: In research published today in the journal Science Advances, sociologists found that people overwhelmingly chose to be generous to others -- even to strangers, and even when it seems one motivation to help might crowd out another. It is the first study to examine how all the established motivations to be generous interact with one another. The study involved more than 700 people, and was designed to help researchers understand prosocial behavior. For this study, which was done online, participants had to decide how much of a 10-point endowment to give to other people. The points had monetary value to the participants; giving cost them something. Then the researchers created different scenarios that combined one or all four of the potential motivators for giving. One: The recipient of a kindness is inclined to do something nice for the giver in return. Two: A person is motivated to do something nice to someone that she saw be generous to a third person. Three: A person is likely to do good in the presence of people in their network who might reward their generosity. And four: A person is likely to "pay it forward" to someone else if someone has done something nice for her. [David Melamed, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University] said that prior to the experiment, he thought the motivations for kindness might crowd one another out. "People have a self-bias," he said. "If you do something nice for me, I may weigh that more than if I see you do something nice for someone else. But we found that all the motivators still show up as predictors of how much a person is willing to give to someone else, regardless of how the differing motivators are combined." This research helps us understand the remarkable quantity and diversity of prosocial behavior we see in humans, Melamed said. "From an evolutionary perspective, it's kind of perplexing that it even exists, because you're decreasing your own fitness on behalf of others," Melamed said. "And yet, we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature."

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