The Effects Of Visual Order On Prosocial Behavior:The Moderating Role Of Need For Cognitive Closure

Prosocial behavior refers to these activities that beneficial to humans and society,including sharing,caring,comfort,donating,cooperation,altruism and so on.In previous research,traits and environment are regarded as the key impact factors of prosocial behavior.However,little research has examined the impact of visual order on prosocial behavior.Concerning the study of how order affects people?s mental activities,judgement and behavior,Foreign scholars usually focus on anti-social behavior.There are no clear conclusions made on the relationship order and prosocial behavior both in China and abroad,and whether there is a difference between individuals.We adopted the methods of field experiment,laboratory experiment and questionnaire to explore and solve these problems.Pilot study was conducted to check the manipulation of physical order firstly.Then study 1,a single-factor between-subjects design,examines the different influences of physical disorder and physical order groups on prosocial behavior with field experiment method.Physical environment often contains various social disorder cues which carry plenty of information.But recent research suggests that basic visual disorder cues may be sufficient to encourage complex rule-breaking behavior without such complex social reasoning.Participants were exposed to visual disorder or visual order pictures to explore how basic visual order would influence prosocial behavior.Furthermore,it is not clear that whether there is an intensity difference on the effects of order.Need for cognitive closure(NFCC)describes individuals? motivation to process information systematically when people are facing ambiguous and uncertain situations which are the characteristics of disorder stimulus.A 2(visual order: visual disorder,visual order)? 2(need for cognitive closure: high need for cognitive closure,low need for cognitive closure)between-subjects experimental design was conducted in Study 3 to examine the moderating effect of NFCC on the relationship between visual order and prosocial behavior.The conclusions are as follows.(1)When people in the physical disorder condition,there was less prosocial behavior;and people in the physical order condition did more prosocial behavior.(2)Linear regression analysis shows that a significant effect of visual order on prosocial behavior,with visual disorder leading to less prosocial behavior,compared to the visual order condition.(3)These results revealed that for individuals with high NFCC,participants in the visual order condition were more likely to help others than those in the visual disorder condition.While for individuals with low NFCC,there was non-significant difference in prosocial behavior between visual order group and visual disorder group.