Abstract

BALABANIAN, Cinthia  and  LEMOS, Viviana. The role of attribution in adolescent prosocial behavior. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2020, vol.37, n.2, pp.129-142. ISSN 1668-7027.  http://dx.doi.org/10.16888/interd.2020.37.2.8.

Prosociality includes those intentional behaviors that are performed for the benefit of other people. Framed in the field of study of positive psychology, the study of prosocial behavior has deepened in recent years, considering different ways in which it can manifest itself. Examples of this type of actions are volunteering and helping in general, and more specifically, acts of cooperation, positive revaluation of the other, condolence, physical or verbal help in the face of a difficulty, consolation at a time of anguish and the rescue. Several variables have been identified that have an incidence in the decision to help; among these are variables specific to the person, factors that have more to do with early development, and variables from the context. These include attributional patterns, that is, interpretations made about the causes of a particular event. In general, the attributional process arises unconsciously, with little effort and in a quick and spontaneous way. The objective of this work was to evaluate the role of the attribution that an individual makes about a situation of potential help in the elicitation of prosocial behavior. An ex post facto research design was used. An intentional non-probabilistic sampling was carried out, from which 359 middle-class adolescents were selected from a private institution in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. For the evaluation of the help behaviors, the Adolescent Prosocial Behavior Scale was applied. This one-dimensional instrument consists of 30 items written in the first person, which express help behaviors, which must be answered using a five-point Likert type scale, indicating how often such behavior is performed. Then, to know the predominant attributional style linked to the help behaviors, four situations were written that express a problem or a need of a specific person, presenting four response options for each case: two corresponding to an internal style of attribution, and two referring to a non-controllable external attribution. A unifactorial ANOVA was performed to determine if prosocial behavior presents variability depending on the attributional style, whether internal, neutral or external. Regarding the main hypothesis of this study, it was found that the average prosocial behavior score obtained by the subjects who presented an uncontrollable external attributional pattern (. = 3.30; DE = .59) was significantly higher than those who presented a neutral attributional style (. = 3.07; DE = .54) and a controllable internal attributional style (. = 2.98; DE = .56) (. (2 351) = 7.88; . < .000). It was found that those subjects, in whom an uncontrollable external attribution predominated, obtained a higher score in prosocial behavior, since they would be attributing the problematic of the situation posed in the instrument mainly to the context, to the circumstances or to chance. On the contrary, those who chose controllable internal causes as a predominant causal explanation would have a lower tendency to be prosocial, since they would be placing more responsibility on the subject who is in the situation described in the instrument, which would have an unfavorable impact on the carrying out of aid actions. These findings provide evidence in favor of the behavior being influenced by patterns of causal attributions. These results are in agreement with previous studies, which found that dynamic representations and mental models based on beliefs about the world, rather than the facts themselves, exert a control over the actions that are carried out.

Keywords : attributional style; prosociality; adolescence; help; behavior..

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