The aim of the study was to examine how the manipulation of information about hypothetical presidential candidates infl uenced youth’ attitudes towards them. The experiment was conducted on 929 subjects (454 women and 475 men), who were either pupils in their fi nal year of secondary school or university students, aged 18–25. The amount of information about politicians was manipulated (politicians’ gender, political affi liation, moral and competence traits (positive or negative), political programme characteristics). The results showed that (1) the own-group favoritism effect was observed only among female participants, (2) female presidential candidate was evaluated better than male presidential candidate in conditions of positive information, yet, when negative information about candidates was provided, female presidential candidate was evaluated worse than male presidential candidate.

This is both a review of previous research and a theoretical paper on altruism. It discusses one of the crucial theories of prosocial involvement: the distinction between endo- and exocentric prosocial motivation depending on the type of internal gratification for the involved individual: satisfaction of the Self vs. improving the circumstances of another person. The relevance and validity of this distinction finds support in early empirical studies. Contemporary findings suggest a more universal regulatory context of this idea, which transcends the domain of altruism and extends to the more general issues of the Self and social perception. In addition, it anticipates a number of cognitive biases consequential to the relationship between endocentric regulation and the Self. The findings support a reinterpretation of the original term “prosocial motivation” and the use of a broader interpretative construct “prosocial orientation”, understood as a complex syndrome of regulation that encompasses the processes of social perception, value judgements, and Self-regulation, both explicit and subliminal.