Self-Extension and the Field Theory Approach to Prosociality

• In Event: 30260 - Joint Roundtables: Section on Social Psychology and Section on Sociology of Emotions
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3: Self and Identity

Abstract

The causes and consequences of prosociality have been central concerns of sociology since its inception (Durkheim 1933; Simpson and Willer 2015; Steiner 2019). Prosociality is also a topic of interdisciplinary concern, with contributions coming from psychology (Penner. et al. 2005), economics (Crawford 2019), anthropology (Ibbotson 2014), evolutionary biology (Hruschka and Henrich 2006), and increasingly from artificial intelligence (Dafoe et al. 2021). Like many important concepts used in sociology, it has been measured and operationalized in many different ways. Even so, there is a broad consensus definition that prosocial behaviors are acts that an agent performs that benefit another agent, at a cost to the agent who performed the act (Lindenberg 2006; Simpson and Willer 2015). Many specific phenomena of sociological importance have been studied under this concept, from personal donations (Harrell 2021; Paxton, Velasco, and Ressler 2020) to costly collective action (Coley, Raynes, and Das 2020; Harrell and Simpson 2016; Oliver 1984). This paper will argue that the consensus definition of prosociality is unstable. It is impossible to make a principled distinction between pro- and anti-sociality using this definition, which empties the category of meaning. We can rid ourselves of this instability by conceiving of prosociality not in terms of the beneficial consequences of a discrete act for an arbitrary other, but as the intersection of two processes: one where the self includes entities that were previously external to the self into the purview of the self and its interest (Coleman 1990; James 1983), and one where social fields offer (or fail to offer) affordances for self-extension and beneficial action towards specific others-included-in-self. This view generates testable predictions and motivates sociologically interesting empirical work on the social patterns of who extends their self towards whom, and under what social conditions this extension occurs.

Author

• Maurice Bokanga, University of Chicago