Abstract:

Prosocial behavior refers to actions that benefit others and society, such as helping, sharing, and cooperating. It not only promotes psychological well-being and positive social relationships, but also contributes to social harmony. This paper first reviews existing intervention strategies for prosocial behavior, then introduces the core principles of wise intervention. On this basis, this paper proposes a wise intervention framework for promoting prosocial behavior and suggests directions for future research.
Prior research has developed a range of intervention approaches from behavioral, cognitive, and emotional perspectives, demonstrating generally positive effects. However, these approaches often involve high implementation costs, show limited stability over time, insufficiently address heterogeneity in intervention effects, and are not fully adapted to digital contexts. As an alternative, wise intervention focuses on the meanings and inferences individuals draw about themselves, others, and the situations they are in, and uses precise, theory- and research-based techniques to alter these meanings. By reshaping individuals’ meaning making and fostering more adaptive interpretations, wise intervention targets the psychological processes underlying behavior. In fact, wise interventions have achieved substantial progress in domains such as education, health, and interpersonal relationships, as illustrated by intervention strategies including growth mindset and self-affirmation. Prosocial behavior is fundamentally shaped by individuals’ meaning making. Whether people engage in prosocial behavior often depends on their beliefs about behavioral outcomes, social norms, and self-concept. Accordingly, the present study proposes a wise intervention framework for prosocial behavior.
The wise intervention framework for prosocial behavior has three main emphasis. First, the framework centers on individuals’ meaning-making processes and specifies intervention strategies based on three fundamental psychological needs—the need to understand, the need to belong, and the need for self-integrity. Individuals often underestimate the positive impact of their actions on others and overlook the self-benefits of prosocial engagement. By providing evidence-based information that highlights the dual benefits of prosocial behavior for both others and the self, interventions can correct such mispredictions and activate intrinsic prosocial motivation. Thus, interventions targeting the need to understand aim to recalibrate biased interpretations of prosocial behavior. As people are more likely to follow the behavior patterns of majority, by conveying descriptive social norms and fostering shared group identity, prosocial behavior can be framed as both prevalent and socially valued, thereby aligning it with individuals’ motivation for social inclusion. Hence, interventions addressing the need to belong focus on strengthening social connectedness and shaping normative perceptions. In addition, drawing on self-affirmation theory and cognitive dissonance theory, strategies such as value reflection and “saying-is-believing” exercises can promote the internalization of prosocial meanings and facilitate self-persuasion. Therefore, interventions targeting the need for self-integrity aim to reinforce a positive and coherent self-concept.
Second, the framework posits that intervention effects are sustained through a recursive “meaning-behavior-situation” process: reconstructed meanings promote prosocial behavior, which generates positive interpersonal feedback and improved situations, and these situational changes in turn reinforce prosocial meanings, forming a self-sustaining cycle.
Third, the framework emphasizes the role of heterogeneity in intervention effectiveness. Specifically, outcomes depend on both individual plasticity (e.g., prior meanings and baseline prosocial tendencies) and environmental affordance, particularly psychological affordance that support the meanings promoted by the intervention. Introducing wise intervention into the domain of prosocial behavior not only extends its scope of application, but also deepens the understanding of prosocial behavior plasticity and provides a new direction for developing more efficient intervention strategies.
Future research should further specify intervention targets and populations based on theoretical and empirical evidence, and develop precise, context-sensitive intervention designs. Rigorous randomized controlled trials in real-world settings are needed to evaluate both short-term and long-term effects, complemented by multi-method approaches that integrate behavioral, self-report, and contextual data. Particular attention should be given to examining heterogeneity, including how individual characteristics and environmental affordance jointly shape intervention effectiveness. In addition, future research should promote the development of digital interventions to enhance scalability and accessibility. Overall, future studies should continue to explore precise intervention approaches for promoting prosocial behavior, so as to better integrate theory and practice and provide actionable insights for education and social governance.

Key words: prosocial behavior, wise intervention, plasticity, meaning making