The Moderation of Prosociality Between the Priming and the Intention of Kindness

Abstract

Kindness is a kind of prosocial behavior with important implications in people’s everyday life. Manipulations based on priming, a process by which recent sensory experiences automatically create perceptual and behavioral readiness, could considerably influence the readiness for acting kindly. The present study has the aim of investigating the moderator role of individual differences in prosociality in the effect of the kindness priming and the causality attribution on the kindness intention. Data from 50 participants of an experiment indicated that the kindness priming provoked higher kindness intention, while attribution didn’t have significant effects. It was found evidence of moderation of prosociality on the effect of the priming. These results indicate that priming manipulation is adequate to study behavior intention in scenarios and also affect the evaluation about the level of participant’s empathy.