Abstract

The current study examines the relationship between parental overprotection and prosocial behavior of undergraduate students, and how the contextual variables such as message framing and dilemma repetition affect the relationship. For this purpose, A total of 145 participants were determined as either parental overprotection group or non-overprotection group based on the Korean-Parental Overprotection Scale(K-POS) scores. Then, an experimental paradigm called ‘public goods game’ was conducted to measure prosocial behavior in context similar to the actual situation where dilemma occurs. In ‘public goods game,’ participants were presented with message that emphasizes positive or negative external effect, or neutral messages related to investing tokens in personal and public accounts, and then repeatedly presented with a 4-block dilemma, consisting of 8 trials per block. The results showed that a group reported parental overprotection shows significantly lower levels of prosocial behavior than the other only in condition that emphasizes negative external effect, especially when dilemma were presented in block 2 and 3. This suggests that a group experiencing parental overprotection does not always show a low level of prosocial behavior, rather prosocial behavior is influenced by various contextual variables.