The Presence of Others, Prosocial Traits, Machiavellianism

Abstract

The presence of others has long been known to have an effect on people’s decisions to engage in more helping behavior, but relatively few studies have examined the interaction between the observation of the helping act and various personality traits of the altruist person. In the present study, subjects were asked to volunteer by offering a less and a more costly charity service in public and under anonymous conditions. We found that prosocial personality traits showed relative independence of situational factors. Scores on the scale of Machiavellianism, in contrast, proved to be strongly dependent on the presence of others, but not on the cost of the offered charity act. Those obtaining high scores on this scale (high-Mach persons) disguised their selfishness and pretended altruism in the presence of others, but realized their self-interest when others were not observing their behavior. This responsiveness to the strategic distinction between the presence and absence of others is discussed in terms of reputation-gaining and competitive altruism.