English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse
  1. View item / 
  2. Item Summary

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Short-term compassion training increases prosocial behavior in a newly developed prosocial game

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons19776

Klimecki,  Olga
Department Social Neuroscience, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons20000

Singer,  Tania
Department Social Neuroscience, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Leiberg_Short-Term.pdf
(Publisher version), 237KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Leiberg, S., Klimecki, O., & Singer, T. (2011). Short-term compassion training increases prosocial behavior in a newly developed prosocial game. PLoS One, 6(3): e17798. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0017798.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0004-A23C-2
Abstract
Compassion has been suggested to be a strong motivator for prosocial behavior. While research has demonstrated that compassion training has positive effects on mood and health, we do not know whether it also leads to increases in prosocial behavior. We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduce a new prosocial game, the Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG), which allows for repeated, ecologically valid assessment of prosocial behavior and is sensitive to the influence of reciprocity, helping cost, and distress cues on helping behavior. Experiment 2 shows that helping behavior in the ZPG increased in participants who had received short-term compassion training, but not in participants who had received short-term memory training. Interindividual differences in practice duration were specifically related to changes in the amount of helping under no-reciprocity conditions. Our results provide first evidence for the positive impact of shortterm compassion training on prosocial behavior towards strangers in a training-unrelated task.