Rethinking Prosociality and Aggression Dynamics Through Cultural Frameworks: Individual and Country-Level Insights

Prosociality and aggression are fundamental social-emotional behaviors with important implications for well-being. While often considered antagonistic, recent evidence suggests they may also coexist as independent tendencies. Cultural norms may shape how these behaviors interact, yet few studies have directly examined their dynamics across cultural contexts. Building on differences in Eastern collectivistic and Western individualistic information-processing and thinking styles, we proposed an integrated model with four cultural regulatory pathways (Eastern Holistic, Eastern Dialectic, Western Analytic, Western Logistic) and examined prosociality-aggression dynamics at both country and individual levels. Secondary data were analyzed from 121 college students in Taiwan (N = 50, Mage = 21.10; representing a collectivistic culture) and the United States (N = 71, Mage = 20.01; representing an individualistic culture). Prosocial and aggressive tendencies to strangers were measured based on task-based paradigms, and individual cultural orientation were measured by self-reported questionnaires. Results revealed that Taiwanese participants exhibited a uni-dimensional, antagonistic relationship between reactive prosociality and aggression, whereas U.S. participants demonstrated a bi-dimensional pattern in which the two behaviors functioned independently. At the individual level, higher horizontal collectivism predicted a stronger antagonistic dynamic between prosociality and aggression, and especially in reactive subtype. Together, these findings provide support for the Holistic-Analytic information-processing framework, suggesting that collectivistic orientations may integrate prosocial and aggressive tendencies into an antagonistic relationship, while individualistic orientations allow them to coexist independently. This study highlights culture’s critical role in shaping social-emotional behavior across countries and individual levels, paving the way for future research and culturally tailored prevention strategies.