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Goal-directed, habitual and Pavlovian prosocial behavior. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 9:135. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00135 Although prosocial behaviors have been widely studied across disciplines, the mechanisms underlying them are not fully understood. Evidence from psychology, biology and economics suggests that prosocial behaviors can be driven by a variety of seemingly opposing factors: altruism or egoism, intuition or deliberation, inborn instincts or learned dispositions, and utility derived from actions or their outcomes. Here we propose a framework inspired by research on reinforcement learning and decision making that links these processes and explains characteristics of prosocial behaviors in different contexts. More specifically, we suggest that prosocial behaviors inherit features of up to three decision-making systems employed to choose between self- and other-regarding acts: a goal-directed system that selects actions based on their predicted consequences, a habitual system that selects actions based on their reinforcemen