Volunteerism and Social Problems: Making Things Better or Worse?

The focus of this article is on prosocial behavior, that is, behavior intended to provide some benefit to another person or group of people. Among most contemporary social psychologists the phrase prosocial behavior still brings to mind bystander interventions in an emergency, the phenomenon so brilliantly studied by people such as Bibb Latané and John Darley (1970), and Jane Piliavin and her associates (Piliavin, Dovidio, Gaertner, & Clark, 1981). However, in recent years a number of helping researchers have turned their attention to other kinds of prosocial behaviors. Specifically, a number of us have begun to study long-term prosocial efforts in response to some persistent or widespread need. There are a number of different prosocial behaviors that would fit this description, but the one on which I will focus on is volunteerism. More specifically, I will present a model of the situational and dispositional antecedents of the decision to volunteer, present some data that speak to the role of both classes of variables in a volunteer's initial decisions, and then discuss some personal and professional questions that my research on volunteerism has raised for me. But before I do any of this, I need to discuss the major characteristics of volunteerism, at least as I see them.