The role of culture in altruism: Thailand and the United States

Abstract

62 Thai and 56 U.S. college students were examined on altruism and helping behavior. Thai-Buddhist culture has traditionally taught the importance of prosocial behaviors. Participants were administered the Self-Report Altruism (SRA) Scale, a specially developed projective measure (Altruism Apperception Test) and an indepth interview. Thais scored significantly higher than U.S. subjects on the SRA Scale (p < .001), and manifested a greater tendency to both offer altruistic projections on the AAT (p < .001) and report that they would personally help in such situations (p < .001). An exploratory, mediational analysis performed on the interview data of a subset of participants revealed that Thais appealed to religion as a reason for helping significantly more than Americans (p < .001), while Americans specifically mentioned religion was not a reason significantly more than Thais (p = .002). Findings suggest a relationship between socio-cultural-religious values and prosocial behavior in that Thai-Buddhist-affiliative-collectivistic society appears more altruistically-oriented than the American relatively more areligious achievement or individualistic-based society. Recommendations are that further studies be conducted to support the validation of the projective measure and explore the possible influence of the spirituality and individualism-collectivism constructs.