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The presence of others has long been known to have an effect on people's decisions to engage in more helping behavior, but relatively few studies have examined the interaction between the observation of the helping act and various personality traits of the altruist person. In the present study, subjects were asked to volunteer by offering a less and a more costly charity service in public and under anonymous conditions. We found that prosocial personality traits showed relative independence of situational factors. Scores on the scale of Machiavellianism, in contrast, proved to be strongly dependent on the presence of others, but not on the cost of the offered charity act. Those obtaining high scores on this scale (high-Mach persons) disguised their selfishness and pretended altruism in the presence of others, but realized their self-interest when others were not observing their behavior. This responsiveness to the strategic distinction between the presence and absence of others is discussed in terms of reputation-gaining and competitive altruism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the present study, the costly signaling theory (CST) is used to examine the effect of an offer of charity on social recognition. On behalf of a charitable organization, 186 students enrolled in 16 different courses were asked to offer support to unfamiliar persons in need. In accordance with our predictions, the results show that significantly more subjects are willing to give assistance if they make charity offers in the presence of their group members than when the offers are made in secret. In accordance with CST—but not with the prevailing explanations in social psychology—the likelihood of charity service was strongly influenced by the expected cost of altruistic behavior. Publicly demonstrated altruistic intentions yielded long-term benefits: Subjects who were willing to participate in a particular charity activity gained significantly higher sociometry scores (as a sign of social recognition) than did others. The cost of volunteerism correlated with social recognition in the case of a charity act judged as the most expensive (giving assistance to mentally retarded children), but not for the other categories of charity offer. Our results suggest that public generosity towards strangers as a costly signal may convey reliable information about subjects'' personality traits, such as cooperativeness, but our data do not support the hypothesis that the signaling mechanism is related to sexual selection and mate choice. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although theoretical considerations suggest that a considerable portion of human altruism is driven by concerns about reputation, few experimental studies have examined the psychological correlates of individual decisions in real-life situations. Here we demonstrate that more subjects were willing to give assistance to unfamiliar people in need if they could make their charity offers in the presence of their group mates than in a situation where the offers remained concealed from others. In return, those who were willing to participate in a particular charitable activity received significantly higher scores than others on scales measuring sympathy and trustworthiness. Finally, a multiple regression analysis revealed that while several personality and behavior traits (cooperative ability, Machiavellianism, sensitivity to norms, and sex) play a role in the development of prosocial behavior, the possibility of gaining reputation within the group remains a measurable determinant of charitable behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]