Cooperation can be contagious particularly when people see the benefit for others

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-05/uota-ccb051920.php

News Release 19-May-2020
University of Texas at Austin


Seeing someone do something good for someone else motivates witnesses to perform their own helpful acts, an insight that could help drive cooperative behavior in communities navigating through the health crisis.

In a new study, psychology researchers at The University of Texas at Austin confirmed that people can be heavily influenced by others, especially when it comes to taking on prosocial behavior -- actions designed to benefit society as a whole. Understanding this is important now, when large-scale cooperation and adoption of protective behaviors -- wearing face masks and avoiding gatherings -- have important implications for the well-being of entire communities, the researchers said.

•••••

"We found that people can readily improvise new forms of prosocial actions. They engaged in behaviors that were different from what they witnessed and extended help to different targets in need than those helped by the prosocial model," said Jung, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The magnitude of this type of influence varied across societies, with Asian countries most likely to be influenced by modeling, followed by European countries, then North American.
[So the more Christian a country is, the less likely they are to follow others helping examples.]

They also found that people were more motivated to help after witnessing other people benefit from the prosocial model than when they benefitted from the prosocial act. This shows that the effect triggered by adopting others' prosocial goals outweighed other potential motives triggered by self-benefit, such as doing it because they felt grateful.

•••••