The Scarcity–Prosociality Link: Ambiguous, Yet Thought-provoking

Lilavati Krishnan

Psychology and Developing Societies, 2022, vol. 34, issue 1, 79-103

Abstract: The present essay examines the scarcity–prosociality link, that is, the conditions in which scarcity leads to self-interest and competitiveness or to other-oriented prosociality and cooperativeness. Adopting a social-psychological approach, the findings of the major investigations of reactions to scarcity are summarised. These studies show both self-interest and prosociality as reactions to scarcity, depending on various mediating factors, although a scarcity mindset or limited-good perception is not revealed directly. This link needs to be interpreted in the light of social-psychological, cognitive, economic and cultural factors. In general, the scarcity–prosociality relationship is found to be ambiguous, yet thought-provoking. Some aspects that require detailed exploration and the multi-pronged implications of the scarcity–prosociality association for societal development are highlighted. It is suggested that effective coping with scarcity in resource-constrained economies will be possible if socialisation and social policies promote practices that enhance resource availability, encourage an optimal use of resources, and modify a competitive stance to a cooperative one, and a zero-sum game perception of resource exchange to one of non-zero-sum game.

Keywords: Scarcity mindset; prosociality; self-interest; limited good image (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09713336221080648 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:psydev:v:34:y:2022:i:1:p:79-103

DOI: 10.1177/09713336221080648

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Psychology and Developing Societies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().