Do you have to be a goody-goody to identify strongly with helping others?

No! People who feel a great deal of freedom and control of their own lives identify strongly with helping others even if they don’t see themselves as goody-goodies. People with strong feelings of individual agency identify strongly with the proposition ‘it is important to help the people nearby’ even if they don’t identify at all with the proposition ‘it is important to always behave properly’.


Before I present a chart showing this, I should provide some background information. I ended my last post wondering whether people who feel little freedom in their own lives might tend to be more likely to engage in anti-social activities if they give high priority to having a good time and feel little control over their own lives. However, when I looked at World Values Survey data on people who identify strongly with the proposition ‘it is important to this person to have a good time’ I found that they tend to identify much more strongly than average with helping others, even when they feel little control over their own lives. (I am basing these observations on cross-tabulations for about 80,000 respondents in 57 countries from the 2005 Survey.)

So, I decided to see if this is also true of people who identify strongly with the proposition ‘it is important for this person to be rich’. It is. It is also true of people who identify strongly with ‘being very successful’, ‘thinking up new ideas and being creative’, ‘being adventurous and taking risks’, ‘looking after the environment’, ‘living in secure surroundings’, ‘tradition’ and ‘always behaving properly’. It seems that people who identify strongly with just about any proposition about the importance of a particular value in their own lives tend to identify strongly with helping others, even when they feel little control over their own lives.

It is hardly surprising that people who identify strongly with the proposition ‘it is important to this person to always behave properly’ would identify with helping others. What about those who see themselves as being a bit naughty – the people who say that proposition ‘is not like me, or not at all like me’? I gave the answer in the first paragraph. It is also shown in the chart below.

I’m not sure of the implications of the finding that people who do not see themselves as giving importance to behaving properly tend nevertheless to identify strongly with helping others if they have strong feelings of personal agency. Perhaps feelings of personal freedom and control of their lives help individuals to behave responsibly even when they prefer to see themselves as being fallible rather than virtuous. This deserves further study.