August 12, 2025 • 24 mins
Why do some people seem naturally kind or generous? Professor Luke Smillie breaks down personality traits like empathy, honesty and compassion – and how they shape behaviour. Tune into this thoughtful discussion about the ‘prosocial personality’ and discover whether people can become more altruistic over time.
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Cassie Hayward (00:00):
This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people,
the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay
respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging.
From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University
of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.
Nick Haslam (00:22):
Hello and thanks for joining us again on PsychTalks. We're
thrilled to be back unpacking the latest research in psychology
and neuroscience. I'm Professor Nick Haslam here with my wonderful co-host,
Associate Professor Cassie Hayward.
Cassie Hayward (00:33):
Thanks, Nick. And I think what we are exploring today
is really going to fascinate many of our listeners at home,
particularly anyone who's ever completed an online personality test or
done one in a doctor's office magazine.
We're looking at what many psychologists in the field call
prosocial personality. Our guest today is Professor Luke Smillie, who's
a leading researcher in this area and whose work has
(00:54):
been very diverse, ranging from understanding the structure of personality
to its role in well-being and its neural underpinnings. So,
let's dive in.
Nick Haslam (01:07):
Welcome, Luke. So what do we mean by prosocial personality?
Luke Smillie (01:10):
Well, prosocial personality is an umbrella term to capture a
range of individual differences in, in our personality traits or
psychological characteristics that are in some way other-regarding, so regarding others.
People vary in how other-regarding they are.
So some are more willing to help others or cooperate.
(01:31):
Uh, they're more moved to feel empathy for a person.
And these differences are relatively stable over time.
Um, for many people, prosocial personality is a bit of
an uncomfortable notion. We want to believe deep down that
all people, we're all the same and we're all fundamentally
good or decent.
And that may be true to some extent, but at
(01:53):
the same time, we recognise people aren't interchangeable. I find
it hard to imagine that anyone would struggle to identify
someone in their life who was exceptionally kind or helpful
or generous or empathic. And if we can single out
such individuals, then we acknowledge that people differ in their prosociality.
Nick Haslam (02:10):
Cassie's like that. I'll just say, um, I'll single her
out here. But yeah, I mean, this idea that people
differ in their concern for others or in their, um,
moral goodness.
I, I think it is pretty intuitive for most of us,
but it's also been a controversial idea within our field, right? Um,
so you'll know the famous study by Hartshorne and May,
where they got a bunch of kids, um, almost a
century ago, uh, and found that those who are honest
(02:33):
in one context weren't necessarily honest in another.
And their work's been used to challenge the very idea
that there is such a thing as moral character. So
what's the evidence that we do have consistent differences in
how prosocial we behave?
Luke Smillie (02:46):
Yeah, that's right, the results of the Hartshorne and May study, um,
prompted some debate that lasted well into the late 20th century.
But much of the debate over its implications really came
down to how that data could best be analysed and interpreted.
One issue was that they had analysed individual pairs of behaviours,
but we now know that we need to sample across
(03:09):
many instances of behaviour before you can estimate consistency very well.
And later studies that did this, including using Hartshorne and
May's data, found much stronger evidence for consistency.
The other issue was that psychologists had a pretty simplistic
understanding of the idea of consistency, and thought that anything
short of perfect stability implied no stability at all.
Nick Haslam (03:31):
Right, I hadn't realised there were so many criticisms. What
about the modern evidence then?
Luke Smillie (03:36):
Well, the modern evidence comes from a variety of areas
within and beyond psychology. So beyond psychology, in economics, behavioural
economists have found stable and systematic differences in how people
behave towards others in controlled experiments of cooperation, generosity, sharing,
and so on.
In psychological science, essentially every model psychologists have put forward
(04:00):
of personality traits, uh, include one distinctly prosocial trait. People
are likely to be familiar with the Big Five. This
is really one of the success stories of 20th century
psychology in terms of robust and replicable findings. The Big
Five is a framework for organising the many, many, many
(04:20):
different ways that people differ from one another.
Um, you could think of it as like a latitude
and longitude of personality space, if you like. So whereas
latitude and longitude are just two dimensions, the Big Five
are 5 dimensions that try to capture all the important
psychological characteristics that vary between people. The Big Five includes
(04:41):
a trait called agreeableness, which essentially describes how cooperative and
compassionate and respectful a person generally is.
And in clinical psychology, psychologists have long recognised personality disorders
marked by antisocial tendencies, um, such as antisocial personality disorder
in the DSM and psychopathy, uh, which is assessed in
(05:03):
clinical but also forensic settings. These are traditionally studies as categories,
so you either have the disorder or not, uh, but
as you would know, Nick, uh, the field is moving
towards more dimensional models
based on the evidence that people don't really differ according
to these categories, we differ by degree.
Cassie Hayward (05:22):
So Luke, with all of those examples, it's kind of
looking at prosocial personality as if it's a single thing.
Is it unitary or are there different ways of being prosocial?
Luke Smillie (05:33):
Yeah, as I said at the beginning, prosociality, we could
think of it as a broad umbrella construct. And there's
many distinctions we could make within that broad space. So
if we take agreeableness that I just mentioned,
That can be divided into politeness and compassion. Um, and
there are some interesting distinctions between politeness and compassion. Often
(05:54):
people have assumed, uh, interpreted a finding in terms of compassion,
and it turns out to be driven by politeness. Um,
so one example from my own work concerns particular moral
judgments that people make about the, the wrongness of a,
of a moral action. There was a literature that suggested
that these were primarily driven by people's compassion.
(06:15):
That these situations are making judgments about triggered concern and empathy, uh,
but it turned out in our work at least that
they were driven primarily by politeness.
Which is more about a person's etiquette or respectfulness, the
degree to which they adhere to salient social rules and norms.
Cassie Hayward (06:34):
So which is better? What should I teach my kids
to do, have empathy or just have good manners?
Luke Smillie (06:39):
That's a hard question and it seems unlikely that one
is better than the other in all ways. Also depends
on what you mean by better. Both have features and
consequences we might feel are good things. People intuitively probably
feel compassion is more desirable.
Um, but there's some really interesting ideas about how compassion
can be undesirable in unexpected ways. I'm thinking of work
(07:02):
by Paul Bloom, the American psychologist, who suggested that compassion
and empathy is something we often feel more readily for
any particular targets. It's easy to feel compassion for somebody
like your kids, but maybe a bit harder to feel
compassion for people very dissimilar to you. So Paul Bloom
argues that compassion can actually be,
somewhat parochial at times, um, and not always a good thing.
Nick Haslam (07:25):
So can being prosocial be boiled down just to compassion
and politeness then, or is there more to it?
Luke Smillie (07:31):
Uh, no, there are many more distinctions we could make. Um,
one that I'd highlight from a different personality model to
the Big Five, it's a trait called honesty-humility. Um, it's
got this kind of awkward hyphenated, double-barrelled name.
Um, Another simpler term for it is sometimes integrity. This
describes the degree to which a person is straightforward and non-manipulative,
(07:56):
not motivated to put themselves ahead of others, and that
predicts many outcomes that we care about, such as lower
likelihood of engaging in criminal behaviour or even infidelity, unethical
decision making, and a range of socially consequential outcomes. But
all of these constructs we're discussing are still relatively broad.
There are many more specific traits that we could zoom
(08:18):
in on like trust, modesty, perspective taking.
And interestingly, some traits that don't seem inherently concerned with
prosocial behaviour can have prosocial implications. So people might have
heard of a trait called openness to experience, which predicts
concern for animals and the environment, for example.
Cassie Hayward (08:37):
And Luke, your work really has clarified those personality traits
that underlie being prosocial, but it's also revealed how these
prosocial traits are related to real world behaviour. Can you
give us some more examples of that real world behaviour research?
Luke Smillie (08:52):
Yeah, I mean, people have looked at a range of
outcomes that these traits might predict, including how much they
volunteer or donate to charity, um, decisions that they might
make in terms of, for example, whether they pursue a
career that enables them to do more good in the world, um,
what they want to happen after they die, uh, for example,
(09:13):
in the case of posthumous organ donation.
So one example from my own work, we recently published
a meta-analysis on personality predictors of philanthropic behaviour, looking at
charitable donations and volunteering. And we're really excited to get
this meta-analysis out there because the evidence with this kind
of often murky real world data was quite mixed, um,
(09:35):
but overall, what we found was that agreeableness is the
strongest trait predictor of real world charitable giving, more, more
agreeable people give more money to charities.
And interestingly, it was extroversion that predicted volunteering. This might
not necessarily suggest that extroversion is a particularly prosocial tendency,
maybe it says something a little bit more about the
(09:56):
kinds of situations in which volunteering occurs. It's often very,
a very social, um, outgoing activity to engage in. And
I'd say that these effects were fairly modest statistically, but
perhaps important in practical terms when you aggregate across uh
to the population level.
Another example is a recent study where we looked at
(10:17):
um factors that predict people's attitudes to social justice issues,
so things that are really topical at the moment, um,
attitudes towards diversity, inclusiveness, initiatives, attitudes towards gender diversity, things
like the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and
so on.
And we found that some of these same traits predicted
(10:38):
people's attitudes towards those social justice concerns, traits like agreeableness.
Cassie Hayward (10:42):
Yeah, and some of those issues are very politicised, of course. Do,
do the prosocial traits like agreeableness predict them over and
above people's political orientations, or
are some orientations just more agreeable on average?
Luke Smillie (10:56):
No, we found for those highly politicised outcomes, um, it's
political attitudes that are usually, um, more important predictors, and
this makes sense. Political attitudes capture by definition, how one
thinks about political issues.
Whereas personality traits are these much broader descriptions of what
a person is like in general across many contexts. But
(11:17):
having said that, there's an interesting model that came out
of New Zealand that suggests that personality traits predict these
politically salient outcomes via our political attitudes. So the idea
is that someone, for example, who is more agreeable and
more open to experience, they might be more likely to
cultivate liberal or progressive political attitudes.
(11:38):
Which in turn are the um primary drivers or or
strong predictors I should say, of how they think about
politically salient issues like diversity and inclusiveness.
Nick Haslam (11:48):
So one topic you've done some work on recently is
how prosocial personalities related to diet and especially vegetarian or
vegan diet.
Can you tell us about that work?
Luke Smillie (11:58):
Yeah, so we've been interested in predicting adherence to specifically, uh, um,
ethical vegetarianism, um, so people who have decided to adopt
a vegetarian or vegan diet for ethical reasons, which we
think of as another kind of prosocial
behaviour. It's other-regarding, the others in this case are just
non-human animals. And again, this kind of real world data,
(12:19):
the findings have often been quite inconsistent and messy. But
we did some research recently where we combined multiple samples
across Australia, New Zealand and the US. We found that
agreeableness was a fairly consistent predictor of adherence to a
vegetarian or vegan diet.
But also that trait I mentioned before, openness to experience.
Cassie Hayward (12:39):
So does that suggest that dialling up those traits can
increase someone's propensity to take a vegetarian diet? Like a, a, a,
you kind of hear people talk about personality being fixed,
and we can't change it, but can you point to research
that says you can kind of dial up and down
those areas?
Luke Smillie (12:59):
Yeah,
so some of these findings are definitely interesting for people
who study personality change, and it's, um, it is really
a persistent misconception that personality can't be changed, that it
is fixed in some way. When you think about it,
it would be quite mysterious if there was something that
was entirely fixed, you would then have to ask, well,
how is it fixed? Is it some mysterious essence within
(13:21):
the person?
Um, but these, uh, personality traits, these psychological characteristics, they
change and develop over time, they can be changed for intervention. Um,
they might change as a result of a significant life experience,
for example, a traumatic experience that, um, profoundly changes somebody.
And there are research areas called personality change and personality
(13:44):
development that have been around for decades, so this persistent
idea that personality is fixed is,
a little puzzling to me sometimes. Having said all of that,
I don't want to give the impression that personality is
limitlessly malleable, that anyone can be whoever they wanna be,
provided they get the right nudge or they buy the
right app, for example. I think that's a common message
you see in the pop psych space, uh, but I
(14:06):
don't think it's very much in touch with the evidence. Um,
indeed my hunches of the prominence of that message in
that self-help space
might be a reflection of the fact that change is
not so easy.
The other thing I'd just add with applications is that
we should be careful to assume that psychological stability is
(14:26):
not practically useful to know about. So in many instances,
maybe the most helpful thing is for a person to
really understand the kind of person that they are and
learn how to, for example, regulate their behaviours or emotions
or identify more appropriate goals for them as an individual.
Rather than tackle the possibly more difficult task of trying
(14:48):
to change who they are. And that's the focus of
a fascinating area of research called self-knowledge, um, and in
this area, the, the goal is to study how well
people know themselves, um, learn whether we can improve our
self-knowledge and whether there are benefits of doing so.
Nick Haslam (15:06):
Uh, I mean, Luke, is there any evidence that if
you just practise prosocial behaviour, it does change your personality?
Do you become more agreeable by practising compassion or practising um
adherence to social justice values?
Cassie Hayward (15:19):
We hope so, because that's what we do with kids, right?
Luke Smillie (15:22):
There's there's some evidence, not so much with these pro-social traits,
but there's some evidence that by
expressing high levels of a trait, uh, you often see
the consequences that are usually associated with that trait. So
the one that's best studied and that my colleagues and
I have done some work on as well concerns extroversion,
(15:43):
and extroversion is a trait that predicts, um,
many measures of well-being, and it turns out that if
you get people to enact prototypical expressions of extroversion, so
getting them to be more talkative, more social and outgoing,
they experience at least temporary increases in well-being. But the
question is whether by doing that you could affect longer
(16:06):
term sustained increases, um, that's, that's still probably an open question.
Nick Haslam (16:12):
So Luke, being prosocial is obviously good for other people.
Is it also good for ourselves? Does it improve our
own wellbeing?
Luke Smillie (16:18):
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and literally just yesterday
I was reading about some work by a former University
of Melbourne student, Jessie Sun.
Ah, that suggests the answer to that is yes, um,
that people who are perceived by others as more, um,
morally good people, actually, more so than prosocial, they report
(16:42):
higher levels of well-being themselves. So it may be that being,
more other-regarding, uh, is also beneficial to the individual in
terms of their overall happiness and satisfaction in their lives.
Cassie Hayward (16:55):
So Luke, what are some of the exciting applications of
research into prosocial personality?
Luke Smillie (17:01):
So there are a few that I think are are
really interesting. Um, one is the idea of targeted or
tailored interventions.
So if you think about that finding from the meta-analysis
I mentioned, uh, showing that agreeableness predicts higher levels of
charitable donations. So one possibility is that campaigns and messaging
(17:22):
that tries to increase, uh, to get people to donate
money to charitable causes is appealing primarily to people high
in agreeableness. So one possibility is that we're, we're kind
of missing a big sector of the population, and through
some kind of tailored, more precision, sometimes called intervention, we
could try to uh identify messaging that would be a
(17:44):
bit more effective for people lower in agreeableness.
An alternative approach would be to just double down on
the most receptive audience. So some of the work we've
done on this idea of ethical vegetarianism, we did a
recent study looking at how different people respond to persuasive
appeals to not eat animals. And there are some characteristics
that predict just really not being persuaded by any ethical
(18:07):
argument at all. Um, so those people may be unreachable through, uh,
an ethically framed appeal to adopt a plant-based diet.
So, animal advocacy groups might be more effective if rather
than sending messages that are gonna fall on deaf ears
to target the people who are going to be the
most receptive. And at a broader level, research into prosocial
(18:29):
personality could potentially help intervention designers think more carefully about
what the behaviour they're seeking to promote entails for an individual.
Um, people aren't these interchangeable data points waiting just dutifully
to receive whatever intervention we have in mind. Any intervention
is going to potentially cut with or against the grain
(18:50):
for different people.
This was the focus of some work I did with
a former student of mine, Reb Rebele, and Reb wanted
to get the message out there that that intervention design
tends to overlook the fact that an intervention is going
to entail different things for different people. So for a
highly prosocial person, the way to get them to engage
in prosocial behaviour might be relatively simple, a simple nudge
(19:13):
or reminder. But for a
less prosocial person, it's possibly going to need something more,
because what you're trying to do is potentially, you're potentially
trying to get them to act in a way that's
counter dispositional or at the very least, not as familiar
or routine. So these are really different cases and perhaps
the one size fits all approach we see in the
behaviour change literature, we often see in the behaviour change literature.
(19:36):
overlooks a fundamental fact about human beings, which is which
we differ.
Cassie Hayward (19:41):
Just on that, Luke, with the increased ability to target
people through online advertising, so these groups might be using,
you know, different social networks to target different ads about
becoming plant-based or whatever the, the information, the whatever the
the campaign is.
Do you think that they can get a read of
(20:02):
someone's personality at this sort of level from their kind
of online presence to be able to do that targeted messaging,
that you're kind of outlining here?
Luke Smillie (20:13):
Yeah, there there's been some really impressive demonstrations of that,
one primarily in the consumer marketing space actually, where essentially
an algorithm provides an estimate of personality traits based on
a digital footprint, uh, for example, Facebook Likes.
And that is then used to select different forms of
(20:35):
an advertisement for the same product. So, there's some research
by Matz and colleagues, uh, about 5 to 10 years ago,
I think, showing that by actually presenting different people, the
different forms of the same advert, uh, that translated into
much higher sales. So that's in a marketing context, um,
you could see that
Uh, same logic being applied in the case of trying
(20:57):
to promote prosocial behaviour.
Cassie Hayward (21:00):
And I think in some of our other episodes we've
seen how much those algorithms know about us, so it's
not beyond the scope of their targeting to, to get
us on personality.
Luke Smillie (21:09):
There's definitely a scary side to
that work that um that yeah, we, we should also
keep in mind in terms of the ethicality of, of
using those algorithms.
Nick Haslam (21:21):
But let's not close on a pessimistic note. Uh, I
think it's just uh such interesting work, Luke, and just
showing how taking human variation seriously.
Uh, really enlightens us about prosocial personality. So, can you
tell us where your work's going next?
Luke Smillie (21:35):
One project that I'm working on at the moment that
ties in nicely with something we talked about earlier, that
Hartshorne and May study, which was about cheating and honesty
and children. Uh, so where my colleagues and I are
doing some studies on both the personality and situational predictors
of lying. We were actually trying to find
(21:56):
an interaction between the situational factors and the personality factors.
We don't find those interactions, but those studies are showing
us that honesty-humility that I mentioned before is a very
important predictor. And a range of situational factors such as
if you want somebody to behave more honestly in our studies, uh,
(22:16):
the best way to do so is to ask them
to take an oath or pledge to be honest.
Nick Haslam (22:21):
Well, I said we'd end on an optimistic note, but
I'm now gonna prove myself a liar.
Um, little provocative question to close out our episode. So,
your work implies that people differ a lot and how
much they care about other people's welfare. So should the
more idealistic among us give up their belief that deep down,
everyone is good?
Luke Smillie (22:40):
Yeah, it's funny to think how uncontroversial this question would
be if we swapped out prosocial or good for another
trait like extroversion, introversion.
I imagine few people out there ah have a firm
cherished belief that deep down everybody is extroverted, um, and
that's a bit of a joke, but if we put
(23:01):
aside some of those ambiguous and hard to define words
like fundamentally good.
Um, these value laden concepts. Um, I'm not sure we
can defend the idea that anyone is fundamentally good, let
alone all of us. Uh, that's just really difficult philosophical
territory for me. Rather than believe that everyone is fundamentally
good or equally nice, I think what I'd encourage is
(23:24):
a desire to find and bring out the best in others,
and that may take multiple forms like compassion or politeness
as we've talked about. But we should also recognise that
not everybody is gonna share our values or be the
person we can depend on.
And while it's uncomfortable, it's probably better for us to
recognise such differences than pretend they don't exist.
Cassie Hayward (23:43):
Fascinating stuff, Luke. Thank you for your time today, and
I'm going to go home and make my kids take
a pledge of honesty and see if that works.
Luke Smillie (23:50):
That sounds good.
Nick Haslam (23:54):
Well, that brings us to the end of another edition
of PsychTalks and a huge thank you to our guest,
Professor Luke Smillie. This episode was produced by Carly Godden
with production support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound
engineering was by Jack Palmer. Bye for now.
This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people,
the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay
respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging.
From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University
of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.
Nick Haslam (00:22):
Hello and thanks for joining us again on PsychTalks. We're
thrilled to be back unpacking the latest research in psychology
and neuroscience. I'm Professor Nick Haslam here with my wonderful co-host,
Associate Professor Cassie Hayward.
Cassie Hayward (00:33):
Thanks, Nick. And I think what we are exploring today
is really going to fascinate many of our listeners at home,
particularly anyone who's ever completed an online personality test or
done one in a doctor's office magazine.
We're looking at what many psychologists in the field call
prosocial personality. Our guest today is Professor Luke Smillie, who's
a leading researcher in this area and whose work has
(00:54):
been very diverse, ranging from understanding the structure of personality
to its role in well-being and its neural underpinnings. So,
let's dive in.
Nick Haslam (01:07):
Welcome, Luke. So what do we mean by prosocial personality?
Luke Smillie (01:10):
Well, prosocial personality is an umbrella term to capture a
range of individual differences in, in our personality traits or
psychological characteristics that are in some way other-regarding, so regarding others.
People vary in how other-regarding they are.
So some are more willing to help others or cooperate.
(01:31):
Uh, they're more moved to feel empathy for a person.
And these differences are relatively stable over time.
Um, for many people, prosocial personality is a bit of
an uncomfortable notion. We want to believe deep down that
all people, we're all the same and we're all fundamentally
good or decent.
And that may be true to some extent, but at
(01:53):
the same time, we recognise people aren't interchangeable. I find
it hard to imagine that anyone would struggle to identify
someone in their life who was exceptionally kind or helpful
or generous or empathic. And if we can single out
such individuals, then we acknowledge that people differ in their prosociality.
Nick Haslam (02:10):
Cassie's like that. I'll just say, um, I'll single her
out here. But yeah, I mean, this idea that people
differ in their concern for others or in their, um,
moral goodness.
I, I think it is pretty intuitive for most of us,
but it's also been a controversial idea within our field, right? Um,
so you'll know the famous study by Hartshorne and May,
where they got a bunch of kids, um, almost a
century ago, uh, and found that those who are honest
(02:33):
in one context weren't necessarily honest in another.
And their work's been used to challenge the very idea
that there is such a thing as moral character. So
what's the evidence that we do have consistent differences in
how prosocial we behave?
Luke Smillie (02:46):
Yeah, that's right, the results of the Hartshorne and May study, um,
prompted some debate that lasted well into the late 20th century.
But much of the debate over its implications really came
down to how that data could best be analysed and interpreted.
One issue was that they had analysed individual pairs of behaviours,
but we now know that we need to sample across
(03:09):
many instances of behaviour before you can estimate consistency very well.
And later studies that did this, including using Hartshorne and
May's data, found much stronger evidence for consistency.
The other issue was that psychologists had a pretty simplistic
understanding of the idea of consistency, and thought that anything
short of perfect stability implied no stability at all.
Nick Haslam (03:31):
Right, I hadn't realised there were so many criticisms. What
about the modern evidence then?
Luke Smillie (03:36):
Well, the modern evidence comes from a variety of areas
within and beyond psychology. So beyond psychology, in economics, behavioural
economists have found stable and systematic differences in how people
behave towards others in controlled experiments of cooperation, generosity, sharing,
and so on.
In psychological science, essentially every model psychologists have put forward
(04:00):
of personality traits, uh, include one distinctly prosocial trait. People
are likely to be familiar with the Big Five. This
is really one of the success stories of 20th century
psychology in terms of robust and replicable findings. The Big
Five is a framework for organising the many, many, many
(04:20):
different ways that people differ from one another.
Um, you could think of it as like a latitude
and longitude of personality space, if you like. So whereas
latitude and longitude are just two dimensions, the Big Five
are 5 dimensions that try to capture all the important
psychological characteristics that vary between people. The Big Five includes
(04:41):
a trait called agreeableness, which essentially describes how cooperative and
compassionate and respectful a person generally is.
And in clinical psychology, psychologists have long recognised personality disorders
marked by antisocial tendencies, um, such as antisocial personality disorder
in the DSM and psychopathy, uh, which is assessed in
(05:03):
clinical but also forensic settings. These are traditionally studies as categories,
so you either have the disorder or not, uh, but
as you would know, Nick, uh, the field is moving
towards more dimensional models
based on the evidence that people don't really differ according
to these categories, we differ by degree.
Cassie Hayward (05:22):
So Luke, with all of those examples, it's kind of
looking at prosocial personality as if it's a single thing.
Is it unitary or are there different ways of being prosocial?
Luke Smillie (05:33):
Yeah, as I said at the beginning, prosociality, we could
think of it as a broad umbrella construct. And there's
many distinctions we could make within that broad space. So
if we take agreeableness that I just mentioned,
That can be divided into politeness and compassion. Um, and
there are some interesting distinctions between politeness and compassion. Often
(05:54):
people have assumed, uh, interpreted a finding in terms of compassion,
and it turns out to be driven by politeness. Um,
so one example from my own work concerns particular moral
judgments that people make about the, the wrongness of a,
of a moral action. There was a literature that suggested
that these were primarily driven by people's compassion.
(06:15):
That these situations are making judgments about triggered concern and empathy, uh,
but it turned out in our work at least that
they were driven primarily by politeness.
Which is more about a person's etiquette or respectfulness, the
degree to which they adhere to salient social rules and norms.
Cassie Hayward (06:34):
So which is better? What should I teach my kids
to do, have empathy or just have good manners?
Luke Smillie (06:39):
That's a hard question and it seems unlikely that one
is better than the other in all ways. Also depends
on what you mean by better. Both have features and
consequences we might feel are good things. People intuitively probably
feel compassion is more desirable.
Um, but there's some really interesting ideas about how compassion
can be undesirable in unexpected ways. I'm thinking of work
(07:02):
by Paul Bloom, the American psychologist, who suggested that compassion
and empathy is something we often feel more readily for
any particular targets. It's easy to feel compassion for somebody
like your kids, but maybe a bit harder to feel
compassion for people very dissimilar to you. So Paul Bloom
argues that compassion can actually be,
somewhat parochial at times, um, and not always a good thing.
Nick Haslam (07:25):
So can being prosocial be boiled down just to compassion
and politeness then, or is there more to it?
Luke Smillie (07:31):
Uh, no, there are many more distinctions we could make. Um,
one that I'd highlight from a different personality model to
the Big Five, it's a trait called honesty-humility. Um, it's
got this kind of awkward hyphenated, double-barrelled name.
Um, Another simpler term for it is sometimes integrity. This
describes the degree to which a person is straightforward and non-manipulative,
(07:56):
not motivated to put themselves ahead of others, and that
predicts many outcomes that we care about, such as lower
likelihood of engaging in criminal behaviour or even infidelity, unethical
decision making, and a range of socially consequential outcomes. But
all of these constructs we're discussing are still relatively broad.
There are many more specific traits that we could zoom
(08:18):
in on like trust, modesty, perspective taking.
And interestingly, some traits that don't seem inherently concerned with
prosocial behaviour can have prosocial implications. So people might have
heard of a trait called openness to experience, which predicts
concern for animals and the environment, for example.
Cassie Hayward (08:37):
And Luke, your work really has clarified those personality traits
that underlie being prosocial, but it's also revealed how these
prosocial traits are related to real world behaviour. Can you
give us some more examples of that real world behaviour research?
Luke Smillie (08:52):
Yeah, I mean, people have looked at a range of
outcomes that these traits might predict, including how much they
volunteer or donate to charity, um, decisions that they might
make in terms of, for example, whether they pursue a
career that enables them to do more good in the world, um,
what they want to happen after they die, uh, for example,
(09:13):
in the case of posthumous organ donation.
So one example from my own work, we recently published
a meta-analysis on personality predictors of philanthropic behaviour, looking at
charitable donations and volunteering. And we're really excited to get
this meta-analysis out there because the evidence with this kind
of often murky real world data was quite mixed, um,
(09:35):
but overall, what we found was that agreeableness is the
strongest trait predictor of real world charitable giving, more, more
agreeable people give more money to charities.
And interestingly, it was extroversion that predicted volunteering. This might
not necessarily suggest that extroversion is a particularly prosocial tendency,
maybe it says something a little bit more about the
(09:56):
kinds of situations in which volunteering occurs. It's often very,
a very social, um, outgoing activity to engage in. And
I'd say that these effects were fairly modest statistically, but
perhaps important in practical terms when you aggregate across uh
to the population level.
Another example is a recent study where we looked at
(10:17):
um factors that predict people's attitudes to social justice issues,
so things that are really topical at the moment, um,
attitudes towards diversity, inclusiveness, initiatives, attitudes towards gender diversity, things
like the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and
so on.
And we found that some of these same traits predicted
(10:38):
people's attitudes towards those social justice concerns, traits like agreeableness.
Cassie Hayward (10:42):
Yeah, and some of those issues are very politicised, of course. Do,
do the prosocial traits like agreeableness predict them over and
above people's political orientations, or
are some orientations just more agreeable on average?
Luke Smillie (10:56):
No, we found for those highly politicised outcomes, um, it's
political attitudes that are usually, um, more important predictors, and
this makes sense. Political attitudes capture by definition, how one
thinks about political issues.
Whereas personality traits are these much broader descriptions of what
a person is like in general across many contexts. But
(11:17):
having said that, there's an interesting model that came out
of New Zealand that suggests that personality traits predict these
politically salient outcomes via our political attitudes. So the idea
is that someone, for example, who is more agreeable and
more open to experience, they might be more likely to
cultivate liberal or progressive political attitudes.
(11:38):
Which in turn are the um primary drivers or or
strong predictors I should say, of how they think about
politically salient issues like diversity and inclusiveness.
Nick Haslam (11:48):
So one topic you've done some work on recently is
how prosocial personalities related to diet and especially vegetarian or
vegan diet.
Can you tell us about that work?
Luke Smillie (11:58):
Yeah, so we've been interested in predicting adherence to specifically, uh, um,
ethical vegetarianism, um, so people who have decided to adopt
a vegetarian or vegan diet for ethical reasons, which we
think of as another kind of prosocial
behaviour. It's other-regarding, the others in this case are just
non-human animals. And again, this kind of real world data,
(12:19):
the findings have often been quite inconsistent and messy. But
we did some research recently where we combined multiple samples
across Australia, New Zealand and the US. We found that
agreeableness was a fairly consistent predictor of adherence to a
vegetarian or vegan diet.
But also that trait I mentioned before, openness to experience.
Cassie Hayward (12:39):
So does that suggest that dialling up those traits can
increase someone's propensity to take a vegetarian diet? Like a, a, a,
you kind of hear people talk about personality being fixed,
and we can't change it, but can you point to research
that says you can kind of dial up and down
those areas?
Luke Smillie (12:59):
Yeah,
so some of these findings are definitely interesting for people
who study personality change, and it's, um, it is really
a persistent misconception that personality can't be changed, that it
is fixed in some way. When you think about it,
it would be quite mysterious if there was something that
was entirely fixed, you would then have to ask, well,
how is it fixed? Is it some mysterious essence within
(13:21):
the person?
Um, but these, uh, personality traits, these psychological characteristics, they
change and develop over time, they can be changed for intervention. Um,
they might change as a result of a significant life experience,
for example, a traumatic experience that, um, profoundly changes somebody.
And there are research areas called personality change and personality
(13:44):
development that have been around for decades, so this persistent
idea that personality is fixed is,
a little puzzling to me sometimes. Having said all of that,
I don't want to give the impression that personality is
limitlessly malleable, that anyone can be whoever they wanna be,
provided they get the right nudge or they buy the
right app, for example. I think that's a common message
you see in the pop psych space, uh, but I
(14:06):
don't think it's very much in touch with the evidence. Um,
indeed my hunches of the prominence of that message in
that self-help space
might be a reflection of the fact that change is
not so easy.
The other thing I'd just add with applications is that
we should be careful to assume that psychological stability is
(14:26):
not practically useful to know about. So in many instances,
maybe the most helpful thing is for a person to
really understand the kind of person that they are and
learn how to, for example, regulate their behaviours or emotions
or identify more appropriate goals for them as an individual.
Rather than tackle the possibly more difficult task of trying
(14:48):
to change who they are. And that's the focus of
a fascinating area of research called self-knowledge, um, and in
this area, the, the goal is to study how well
people know themselves, um, learn whether we can improve our
self-knowledge and whether there are benefits of doing so.
Nick Haslam (15:06):
Uh, I mean, Luke, is there any evidence that if
you just practise prosocial behaviour, it does change your personality?
Do you become more agreeable by practising compassion or practising um
adherence to social justice values?
Cassie Hayward (15:19):
We hope so, because that's what we do with kids, right?
Luke Smillie (15:22):
There's there's some evidence, not so much with these pro-social traits,
but there's some evidence that by
expressing high levels of a trait, uh, you often see
the consequences that are usually associated with that trait. So
the one that's best studied and that my colleagues and
I have done some work on as well concerns extroversion,
(15:43):
and extroversion is a trait that predicts, um,
many measures of well-being, and it turns out that if
you get people to enact prototypical expressions of extroversion, so
getting them to be more talkative, more social and outgoing,
they experience at least temporary increases in well-being. But the
question is whether by doing that you could affect longer
(16:06):
term sustained increases, um, that's, that's still probably an open question.
Nick Haslam (16:12):
So Luke, being prosocial is obviously good for other people.
Is it also good for ourselves? Does it improve our
own wellbeing?
Luke Smillie (16:18):
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and literally just yesterday
I was reading about some work by a former University
of Melbourne student, Jessie Sun.
Ah, that suggests the answer to that is yes, um,
that people who are perceived by others as more, um,
morally good people, actually, more so than prosocial, they report
(16:42):
higher levels of well-being themselves. So it may be that being,
more other-regarding, uh, is also beneficial to the individual in
terms of their overall happiness and satisfaction in their lives.
Cassie Hayward (16:55):
So Luke, what are some of the exciting applications of
research into prosocial personality?
Luke Smillie (17:01):
So there are a few that I think are are
really interesting. Um, one is the idea of targeted or
tailored interventions.
So if you think about that finding from the meta-analysis
I mentioned, uh, showing that agreeableness predicts higher levels of
charitable donations. So one possibility is that campaigns and messaging
(17:22):
that tries to increase, uh, to get people to donate
money to charitable causes is appealing primarily to people high
in agreeableness. So one possibility is that we're, we're kind
of missing a big sector of the population, and through
some kind of tailored, more precision, sometimes called intervention, we
could try to uh identify messaging that would be a
(17:44):
bit more effective for people lower in agreeableness.
An alternative approach would be to just double down on
the most receptive audience. So some of the work we've
done on this idea of ethical vegetarianism, we did a
recent study looking at how different people respond to persuasive
appeals to not eat animals. And there are some characteristics
that predict just really not being persuaded by any ethical
(18:07):
argument at all. Um, so those people may be unreachable through, uh,
an ethically framed appeal to adopt a plant-based diet.
So, animal advocacy groups might be more effective if rather
than sending messages that are gonna fall on deaf ears
to target the people who are going to be the
most receptive. And at a broader level, research into prosocial
(18:29):
personality could potentially help intervention designers think more carefully about
what the behaviour they're seeking to promote entails for an individual.
Um, people aren't these interchangeable data points waiting just dutifully
to receive whatever intervention we have in mind. Any intervention
is going to potentially cut with or against the grain
(18:50):
for different people.
This was the focus of some work I did with
a former student of mine, Reb Rebele, and Reb wanted
to get the message out there that that intervention design
tends to overlook the fact that an intervention is going
to entail different things for different people. So for a
highly prosocial person, the way to get them to engage
in prosocial behaviour might be relatively simple, a simple nudge
(19:13):
or reminder. But for a
less prosocial person, it's possibly going to need something more,
because what you're trying to do is potentially, you're potentially
trying to get them to act in a way that's
counter dispositional or at the very least, not as familiar
or routine. So these are really different cases and perhaps
the one size fits all approach we see in the
behaviour change literature, we often see in the behaviour change literature.
(19:36):
overlooks a fundamental fact about human beings, which is which
we differ.
Cassie Hayward (19:41):
Just on that, Luke, with the increased ability to target
people through online advertising, so these groups might be using,
you know, different social networks to target different ads about
becoming plant-based or whatever the, the information, the whatever the
the campaign is.
Do you think that they can get a read of
(20:02):
someone's personality at this sort of level from their kind
of online presence to be able to do that targeted messaging,
that you're kind of outlining here?
Luke Smillie (20:13):
Yeah, there there's been some really impressive demonstrations of that,
one primarily in the consumer marketing space actually, where essentially
an algorithm provides an estimate of personality traits based on
a digital footprint, uh, for example, Facebook Likes.
And that is then used to select different forms of
(20:35):
an advertisement for the same product. So, there's some research
by Matz and colleagues, uh, about 5 to 10 years ago,
I think, showing that by actually presenting different people, the
different forms of the same advert, uh, that translated into
much higher sales. So that's in a marketing context, um,
you could see that
Uh, same logic being applied in the case of trying
(20:57):
to promote prosocial behaviour.
Cassie Hayward (21:00):
And I think in some of our other episodes we've
seen how much those algorithms know about us, so it's
not beyond the scope of their targeting to, to get
us on personality.
Luke Smillie (21:09):
There's definitely a scary side to
that work that um that yeah, we, we should also
keep in mind in terms of the ethicality of, of
using those algorithms.
Nick Haslam (21:21):
But let's not close on a pessimistic note. Uh, I
think it's just uh such interesting work, Luke, and just
showing how taking human variation seriously.
Uh, really enlightens us about prosocial personality. So, can you
tell us where your work's going next?
Luke Smillie (21:35):
One project that I'm working on at the moment that
ties in nicely with something we talked about earlier, that
Hartshorne and May study, which was about cheating and honesty
and children. Uh, so where my colleagues and I are
doing some studies on both the personality and situational predictors
of lying. We were actually trying to find
(21:56):
an interaction between the situational factors and the personality factors.
We don't find those interactions, but those studies are showing
us that honesty-humility that I mentioned before is a very
important predictor. And a range of situational factors such as
if you want somebody to behave more honestly in our studies, uh,
(22:16):
the best way to do so is to ask them
to take an oath or pledge to be honest.
Nick Haslam (22:21):
Well, I said we'd end on an optimistic note, but
I'm now gonna prove myself a liar.
Um, little provocative question to close out our episode. So,
your work implies that people differ a lot and how
much they care about other people's welfare. So should the
more idealistic among us give up their belief that deep down,
everyone is good?
Luke Smillie (22:40):
Yeah, it's funny to think how uncontroversial this question would
be if we swapped out prosocial or good for another
trait like extroversion, introversion.
I imagine few people out there ah have a firm
cherished belief that deep down everybody is extroverted, um, and
that's a bit of a joke, but if we put
(23:01):
aside some of those ambiguous and hard to define words
like fundamentally good.
Um, these value laden concepts. Um, I'm not sure we
can defend the idea that anyone is fundamentally good, let
alone all of us. Uh, that's just really difficult philosophical
territory for me. Rather than believe that everyone is fundamentally
good or equally nice, I think what I'd encourage is
(23:24):
a desire to find and bring out the best in others,
and that may take multiple forms like compassion or politeness
as we've talked about. But we should also recognise that
not everybody is gonna share our values or be the
person we can depend on.
And while it's uncomfortable, it's probably better for us to
recognise such differences than pretend they don't exist.
Cassie Hayward (23:43):
Fascinating stuff, Luke. Thank you for your time today, and
I'm going to go home and make my kids take
a pledge of honesty and see if that works.
Luke Smillie (23:50):
That sounds good.
Nick Haslam (23:54):
Well, that brings us to the end of another edition
of PsychTalks and a huge thank you to our guest,
Professor Luke Smillie. This episode was produced by Carly Godden
with production support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound
engineering was by Jack Palmer. Bye for now.
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