Can altruism spur health in the community?
The propensity for humans to help one another and perform altruistic acts is deeply rooted, and such acts have emerged especially in uncertain times and emergencies, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Altruistic acts not only speak to the endurance of the human spirit, but studies have shown that they also may be leveraged to spur health.
A paper recently published in JAMA Network Open, co-first authored by Assistant Professor Rayner Kay Jin Tan, reports on the findings of a systematic review and meta-analysis to better understand the potential of prosocial interventions in spurring health. Prosocial interventions promote voluntary actions that benefit others. The team searched for studies that involved comparator groups and looked at the impact of such interventions on health or medical outcomes.
A total of 30 studies found that prosocial interventions were associated with improved health outcomes among vulnerable groups and have been useful for addressing health disparities. ‘Pay-it-forward’ approaches were associated with increased uptake of diagnostic tests or vaccines among vulnerable groups, and community connectedness facilitated prosocial interventions.