Prosocial behavior is by definition prosocial; It benefits others socially.  

One would think that some simple acts of prosocial behavior would be easy to do, like paying for the drink/meal of the person behind you in line at a fast food restaurant.  But depending on your cashier, certain prosocial behaviors are frowned upon and some are just flat-out denied.  

As part of an assignment, I was required to commit one act of prosocial behavior without telling anyone.  

Spoiler:  I am telling everyone via this article.  Not because I want to feel good about myself or project some socially conscious persona, but because my experience was so strangely difficult and I felt it needed to be shared.  I tried doing something kind for someone else and was denied by the establishment itself.  This was probably the most shocking detail of my experience.

My first attempt at paying for someone else’s food was met with flat-out refusal.  I ordered my food and quietly asked if I could pay for the person-behind-me’s food.  

McDonald’s was not having any of that.

The clerk looked me dead in the eye and said no.  He then proceeded to ring me up for my purchase and help the next person in line.  I was shocked, to say the least.  Definitely disappointed.  A little angry, too.  How dare they deny me my opportunity to feel good!?  I know this act of prosocial behavior is about benefiting another but what about me and my social good deeds?  I took my food and left.

I was baffled.  It was jarring to have my first attempt at paying for another simply rejected.  It made me wonder why.

Was it economical?  Was it simply too much trouble or effort to start a “pay-it-forward” chain, as it is so colloquially called?  After a bit of online research, I found that not only are pay-it-forward chains common, they are on the rise.  They occur all over the place, from Chick-fil-a, to Starbucks, to other McDonald’s chains.

But that doesn’t help me understand why I couldn’t pay for someone else.  If other people could do it at other McDonald’s, why can’t I?

It simply could have been that the cashier just didn’t want to have to deal with it.  I’m not entirely certain.

I understand that one of the details of the assignment was to not let anyone know about my behavior.  My choice of prosocial behavior is unfortunately extremely difficult to do without telling at least the person responsible for handling the payment of the order.  That is why I asked quietly.  I understand that I could have chosen a slightly quieter prosocial behavior (like giving someone money and walking away, or topping out someone’s parking meter downtown), but I was not basing my decision (at least consciously, as far as I’m aware) on someone else seeing me do this or not; I was merely basing it off of convenience.  

I was attempting to ‘help’ because it was easy for me to do and one of my paper’s grades depended on it.

Completely undeterred, I decided to head to one more McDonald’s, bound and determined to pay for somebody’s meal.  I was going to be helpful, dammit, even if my behavior is slightly fueled by the fact that I will receive a grade for it.  The second McDonald’s held the same results.  I was flabbergasted.  Not only have my prosocial advances been denied, they’d been denied twice.  

What was going on?  Was I encountering some alternate universe where paying for others is frowned upon so much as to be flat-out refused?  I couldn’t take it, so I asked: “Why?  Why can’t I pay for the person behind me?”

According to this cashier, they wouldn’t let me pay for the person behind me because 1. I was paying with a card, and 2. There wasn’t an option on the touchscreen to allow for something like that.  Ah-ha!  So that was it.  I had to pay in cash, and pick a place that feasibly would let me do this.  Wonderful.  (Admittedly, after some thought, that felt like a pretty lousy excuse).

Unfortunately, I had absolutely no cash on me, thus prompting a trip to the ATM.  Gosh, being prosocial is turning out to be a lot more work than being anti- or asocial.

So I headed to my final destination: a local coffee shop that was not a Starbucks.  Why not Starbucks?  I don’t know; laziness?  The local shop was closer.

Anyway, I had my $5 in hand, and dammit, someone was having their order paid for by me, whether they liked it or not.  I arrived to the shop and everything was quiet.  It was just the barista and me.  Good.  Perhaps I could be in and out, having paid for the next person’s drink and no one but the barista would’ve been the wiser.  

Thankfully, the barista did take my $5 and did accept my act of paying for the next person’s drink.  I was so happy to finally be done with the whole thing.  I felt elated and it felt good.

Maybe it was the effort I put forth to make this happen.  Perhaps it was the fact that I now had something to write my paper on (and subsequently this article).  But maybe it was what this experience taught me about prosocial behavior: that maybe it’s not entirely about the other person (even though they are the ones directly benefiting and the definition literally says that it is intended to help another) but perhaps more about the person performing the act.  I mean, who truly benefits more from my act: me or the person ordering after me?

If we’re being honest, I frankly didn’t give a damn whether or not the person behind me had their order paid for; What mattered to me was that I was the one who paid for it, thus receiving my internal rewards.  

So was my behavior truly prosocial?  Well, yeah.  It definitely wasn’t altruism.  I had far too many rewards riding on my effort to say that I did it just for the other person.  I did it for me.  

But who said prosocial behavior wasn’t selfish in its own way?