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The effects of need and reciprocity on prosocial behavior have been primarily studied in separate research domains. A distinction between helping those in need and reciprocity is also made in current discussions on how to motivate posthumous organ donation, contrasting the help of needing patients with an equal contribution to a common pool of organs and effective measures against free riding. The authors examined the interactive effects of need and reciprocity on moral emotions relevant for helping (e.g., sympathy, guilt, moral anger) in an experiment in which participants imagined donating or not donating their organs to patients who were or were not willing to donate themselves and who differed in the need for an organ. They found that lack of reciprocity reduced the intensity of certain moral emotions (e.g., sympathy, guilt) but only under low need. High need appeared to arouse forgiveness for free riding. Implications for attempts to increase the number of registered organ donors are discussed.

To examine why people are reluctant to engage in intergroup contact, the present study asked members of a nationwide online panel (N= 555) to imagine that they would get individuals of a particular social group as next-door neighbors. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of five different social groups hypothesized to differ in emotion-arousing potential: elderly people, people with mild or severe intellectual disability, economic refugees, and young offenders. It was found that differences in acceptance between these groups could be well explained by emotions aroused while anticipating contact yet less well by differences in previous contact with these groups. Furthermore, emotions appeared to be uniquely related to preferred interpersonal relationships. It is concluded that research on how to reduce prejudice through intergroup contact should be complemented with a better understanding of why people are reluctant to engage in such contact in the first place.