Project data
Funding entiy: Italian Ministry of University and Research
Call: PRIN 2017
Coordinator: UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI FIRENZE
UNISI Principal Investigator: Alessandro Innocenti
Department: Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences
Start date: 29 April 2021 – End date: 29 April 2024
Description
This project brings together a variety of competences and methods to address the following research question: which cognitive mode is more likely to foster prosocial behavior?
Up to now, such a debate is lively and far from being set, with the literature providing both conflicting theoretical arguments and inconclusive empirical evidence.
We aim at reconciling apparently inconsistent findings by distinguishing two different cases of intuitive cognition: when intuition is a conscious process, and when it is an automatic process.
Our hypothesis isthat the drivers of prosocial behavior, which we refer to as “social motives”, strictly depend on the cognitive mode. Indeed, we believe that prosocial behavior is mainly driven by empathy under automatic intuition, by social sanctioning under conscious intuition, and by both social sanctioning and morality under deliberation.
In this project, we plan to investigate theoretically and experimentally this hypothesis. If we are successful, we can obtain a rationalization of apparently conflicting evidence provided by the literature and, more in general, we can foster the understanding of the relationship between cognitive mode and prosocial behavior, as mediated by social motives.
This project has received funding from Ministry of University and Research (MUR) – PRIN 2017