Research On The Influence Of Social Observation On The Third-party Fairness Norm Maintenance Behavior

As the premise of human cooperation and social development,fairness norm is a behavioral criterion that people agree and stick to.When observing the events violating the fairness norm,people are willing to sacrifice their own interests to intervene in the unfair events and implement the maintenance of the fairness norm,even if they have nothing to do with unfair events.In the face of the events that violate social justice,the third-party,who has no interest in the events,will punish the proposer of the first party,which is called the third-party punishment behavior.The third party may sacrifice its own interests to improve the benefit of the second party victim,which is called the third-party compensation behavior.The third-party punishment and the third-party compensation are both effective acts to maintain the fairness norm.As social animals,human beings interact with group members all the time.In the era of network media,information is spread quickly and conveniently,and people’s behavior is easy to be noticed by others.The existence of social observers has been shown to significantly affect a variety of human social decision-making behaviors.This study further investigated whether and how the social observation from bystanders affected the third party’s fair maintenance behavior.Four experiments were designed to investigate this problem.In all four experiments,participants as the third party watched the interactions of first and second parties in the presence and absence of social observers and decided whether or not to intervene.Experiment 1 examined the effect of social observation on the fairness maintenance behavior of the third party when the third party had the choice of not acting or punishing the first party in the face of unfair distributions.Experiment 2 examined the effect of social observation on the third party’s fairness maintenance behavior when the third party had two choices:non-action or compensation.Experiment 3 examined the effect of social observation on the fairness maintenance behavior of the third party when the third party had the choice of non-action,punishing the first party and compensating the second party.Experiment 4 further investigated the effect of social observation on the fairness maintenance behavior of the third party when the third party could make multiple choices between non-action,punishing the first party and compensating the second party,i.e.,punishing only,compensating only,punishing first and then compensating,compensating first and then punishing,and omission.The results showed that the intervention rate of the third party in the unfair trials was significantly higher than that in the fair trials in the four experiments,regardless of whether there were social observers.In Experiment 1,we further analyzed the influence of social observation on the maintenance behavior of third-party fairness norms.Compared with the non-social observation situation,the third party punished the first party of unfair distribution more in the presence of social observation situation.In Experiment 2,it was found that the third party compensated second party was unfairly treated more in the presence of social observation than in the absence of social observation.Experiment 3 found that when the third party was forced to choose between non-action,punishment or compensation,social observation did not affect the third-party punishment rate,but significantly increased the third-party compensation rate.Experiment 4 found that when the third party could make multiple choices,social observation did not affect the third-party punishment rate,but significantly increased the third-party compensation rate,the rate of punishment-before-compensation,and the rate of compensation-before-punishment.To sum up,the third-party fairness criterion maintains is steadily present.Social observation can significantly affect the third party’s fairness maintenance behavior,which is mainly manifested as the enhancement of compensation behavior,suggesting that social observation,as an effective social supervision mechanism,can effectively and positively enhance the fairness norm maintenance behavior.