[ Abstract / Highlights ]
Research surrounding prosociality, defined as the ability to promote behaviors that enhance the utility of others, has been one of the most interesting studies in recent years. This is because prosociality is widely defined as one of the non-cognitive abilities, and non-cognitive abilities are attracting attention as abilities that affect socioeconomic characteristics such as children's future education and income (JJ. Heckman, 2006; Elango et al., 2005). There is a high level of interdisciplinary interest in how such prosociality develops and improves. In particular, several existing studies in the field of educational economics have reported a relationship between academic achievement in core subjects and prosociality in countries other than Japan, such as the United States (Wantzel, 1993; Keung, 2003; Penner et al. 2005; Caprara et al. 2015; Maria et al., 2018; Alpona, 2020).
These previous studies adopted the mechanism of the influence of prosociality on academic achievement as a theoretical framework but given that prosociality requires the ability to understand others, it is possible that there is a mechanism by which academic achievement influences prosociality. Since one of the goals of Japanese language education in Japan is to enhance the ability to understand others through text reading, it is thought that academic ability in the Japanese language has a sufficient influence on prosociality. However, there have been no studies examining the relationship between academic achievement and prosociality using data from Japan. Also, there are no studies that examine how preference for major subjects is related to the development and improvement of prosociality. Even if academic ability is high, preference for a subject is considered to be an important factor in whether or not the ability learned from that subject is put into practice. Therefore, it is thought that preference for each subject, as well as academic ability, is related to prosociality. Similarly, there is no study that analyzes how the relationship between academic ability, preference, and prosociality changes over a wide range of grades from lower to upper grades. Because the ability to understand others increases with age, we would expect a stronger relationship between academic achievement and prosociality to emerge with increasing age.
Therefore, in order to investigate the relationship between academic achievement and preference for Japanese and mathematics and prosociality in Japan, and how these relationships change with increasing age, I conducted regression analysis using JCPS data for grades 1 through 3 (7-15 years old). The results showed that most of the significant relationships between academic achievement and preference for Japanese and arithmetic (mathematics) and prosociality were observed to be positive. On the other hand, significant negative relationships were reported between academic achievement in math (mathematics) and prosociality, which consisted of the question item "be kind to younger children," in the 5th and 1st grades of elementary school and 1st grade of junior high school. This can be attributed to the fact that children who were sufficiently rationalized by math did not choose prosocial behavior as a means of maximizing their utility, since they could not expect anything in return from younger children. In addition, the independent variable that was most significantly related to each prosociality in each grade was the preference for the Japanese, and a significant positive relationship was found in all analyses. In the multiple regression analysis that included the independent variables of academic ability in reading comprehension and preference for the Japanese, which are considered to have a strong positive relationship with the ability to understand others, with each prosociality as the dependent variable, the other academic ability variables were not significant or contrary to expectations, were significant with a negative coefficient. The multiple regression results suggest that the single regression analysis in this paper, which included only the academic achievement variable and not the preference for the national language, and the results in the previous literature have turned the academic achievement variable into a proxy variable for the preference for the national language.
There are three major contributions of this study to prosociality: First, it was the first empirical analysis of the relationship between prosociality and academic achievement in Japan, and compared the results with those of other countries. Although the results of the analysis of the relationship between academic achievement and prosociality in Japan were not significantly different from those of other countries, some of the results of this study suggest that children may choose prosocial behaviors to maximize their own utility, not based on social preferences. Second, this is the first empirical analysis and discussion of the relationship between preference for major subjects and prosociality. The most positive relationship between prosociality and preference for the Japanese language was found in all the analyses conducted at each grade level. Third, the empirical analysis showed differences in the development of prosociality between the subjects and their preferences through the analysis of each grade. The third is that the empirical analysis showed differences in the development of prosociality between subjects and preferences through analysis at each grade level. No special differences were found in the relationship between preference for each subject and prosociality as age increased. Rather, the results showed an increase in non-significant results for academic achievement and prosociality. This result is contrary to the original expectation of this study, and suggests that the academic achievement variable is positively related to the ability to understand others, which is necessary for prosociality, but it is also positively related to tendencies that inhibit prosocial behavior, such as calculated behavior. Therefore, as students move up through the grades and as calculation ability becomes more important, it tends to lose its relationship with prosocial behavior. Future research should explore whether prosociality changes when academic performance changes, and whether the relationship between academic performance and prosociality tends to strengthen with age, even for children younger than first grade.