Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
Previous studies found that episodic simulation for helping increases helping intention (e.g., Gaesser et al., 2014). Morris et al. (2018) demonstrated that imagining harm behavior increased intention to do harm behavior. Although people might imagine helping and no helping for decision making when they encounter a person in need, it remains unclear whether imagining no helping undermines intention to helping. We considered this issue via online experiment. The results indicated that those who imagined helping in response to the stories describing a person in need reported the higher rating of helping intention relative to those who imagined no helping and those who considered media sources of the stories (i.e. control group). Thus, our results suggest that the effect of imagining on intention depends on types of imagined behavior.
