The Effect Of College Students’ Perspective Taking In Social Decision Making On Affective Priming

As Adam Smith said in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘ How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’Social decision making, especially that of prosocial decisions, has already been a grand proposition in this era, which is so large that is concerned with the social welfare and inter-corporate game, whereas so tiny that whether willing to donate or not. Based on previous studies, this research was conducted to 292 college students from 6 comprehensive universities, about the effect of perspective-taking to social decision making on different affective priming.Study 1 is about the effect of perspective-taking to social decision making, in which the result indicates that empathy is the intermediate factor in the process. In study 2 affective priming is included, and the result indicates that affective priming acts as a intermediary agent in the pattern. Study 3 is about the effect of reasonable emotion regulation based on the theories, and the result indicates that Cognitive reappraisal is effective to improve the effect of perspective-taking to social decision making under negative emotional status.From results of the above three experiments, the following conclusion can be drawn in the research:(1) Participates in the imagine condition reported feeling more empathy and making more prosocial decision making than did participates in the objective condition. Meanwhile participates in the imagine-self condition also has significant prosocial tendency to those in the imagine-other condition.(2) Empathy could mediate the effect of perspective taking on social decision making.(3) Emotion served to moderate the association between perspective taking and social decision making through the mediation by the empathy: participates in the imagine-other condition reflects more altruistic behavior than those in the imagine-self and objective conditions in positive emotion priming. Meanwhile, when it comes to the negative emotion, there is no significantly influence among them.(4) The use of emotion regulation strategy has a significantly effects on reducing the negative emotion in affective priming, and then it could reduce the egoism perspective in social decision making.