Prosocial sharing with organizations after the COVID-19 pandemic: A longitudinal test of the role of motives for helping and time perspectives.

The time after the COVID-19 pandemic posed a threat to engagement in prosocial behaviors within charity organizations. In the current study, we intended to test how three motivational paths: affective empathy-based, life satisfaction-based, and perceived social support-based shaped the change in intentions to give money and time to charity organizations over a yearly period (right after revocation of the most essential anti-COVID-19 laws and at the same time, outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022, in May 2022 and after a year, in late April-early May 2023). We also tested how past negative and present hedonistic time perspectives-namely, those most robust in predicting emotional states - shaped the changes in the abovementioned motivational paths and giving intentions. We conducted our longitudinal study on the general population of Poland (N = 566). We found that there has been a significant drop in the willingness to give time to organizations over the year after loosening the COVID-19 restrictions and the outbreak of war in Ukraine. We found that affective empathy helped sustain the intentions to give time to organizations, whereas past negative time perspective contributed to the decrease in such intentions. Our study suggests threats to organizations and highlights potential ways to encourage supporting them and caring for their volunteers' well-being.