An appraisal-driven emotional reward approach to unpacking prosocial behavior across task difficulty

Research on prosocial behavior (PSB) has largely focused on prosocial decision-making, which, while experimentally convenient, may not capture how PSB unfolds in real life, particularly when acting prosocially is costly. Task demand has also been shown to both hinder and facilitate PSB. We therefore examined PSB as a process, from mental preparation to post-action experience, across varying task difficulties, using an appraisal-driven emotional reward framework to probe the core self-other tension of benefit. In a multi-participant experiment, groups of 3-5 completed effort-based trials to earn monetary rewards across task difficulties and four benefit conditions: self, an anonymous partner, both, or neither (control). Participants rated perceived importance (PI) before each trial and satisfaction (SAT) afterward, with reaction time and success rate extracted afterward. Data from 51 participants showed that both the difficulty and benefit conditions robustly influenced SAT. PI appeared to vary across benefit conditions but remained approximately stable across levels of task difficulty. Furthermore, SAT appeared to track PI in the easy condition but became reversed with PI as task difficulty increased, suggesting differences in how PSB unfolded. These findings illustrate how task difficulty shapes the PSB process and point to trends warranting further investigation.