Self-consciousness, self-reported altruism, and helping behavior

Female participants who differed in public and private self-consciousness and in self-reported altruism were afforded an opportunity to assist a person in need. As anticipated, participants high in private self-consciousness provided more assistance to the recipient than did participants low on this attribute. However, there was a tendency for “high private” participants to be somewhat less helpful if they were also high in public self-consciousness. Internal analyses revealed that self-reported altruism, a measure of one’s altruistic inclinations, reliably predicted the helping behavior of participants high in private self-consciousness, but did not predict the prosocial actions of those low in private self-consciousness. The implications of these findings for self-consciousness theory and the issue of value-behavior correspondence are discussed.