Intergroup Attitudes Under Pathogen Threat Situations: The Influence Of Psychological Distance And Social Value Orientatio

Most species,including humans,have been repeatedly threatened by various harmful pathogens and parasites during the evolutionary process.To deal with these threats,humans have gradually developed a series of protective measures over the course of evolution.Besides the physiological immune system,there is also a behavioral immune system.This system compensates for the lag in defense of the physiological immune system.Compared with the physiological immune system,which which activates protection only after a germ invades a living organism,the behavioral immune system brings protection activation to the pre-invasion stage and activates protection as soon as it detects a threat cue in the environment,by exhibiting a series of aversion,anxiety and avoidance responses to ward off the threat.The system complements the physiological immune system,which works together to protect the living organism.However,the system inevitably has some shortcomings,and its high sensitivity and over-generalization can cause individuals to make misrepresentation errors in determining threat cues,treating non-conventional but non-infectious cues as threats and rejecting and avoiding them,which can have some negative effects on interpersonal and inter-group interactions.However,some studies have found that individuals do not show the same tendency to devalue and reject friends and family in germ threat situations,suggesting that there are other factors that influence the process from the activation of the behavioral immune system to the eventual manifestation of the tendency to react.Friendship and kinship belong to the social distance dimension in the concept of psychological distance,that is,individuals who have high perceived similarity and familiarity and close psychological distance.Research has shown that under conditions of close psychological distance,individuals engage in more altruistic behavior toward others.In addition to the fact that psychological distance affects individuals’ altruistic behavior,the social values that individuals adhere to also guide individuals’ behavior.Individuals who adhere to prosocial values will engage in more pro-social behavior and be more willing to help others in distress than those who adhere to pro-ego values.Therefore,this study intends to examine the influence of two factors,psychological distance and social value orientation,in the process from the initiation of the behavioral immune system to the final manifestation of the tendency to respond,and explore ways to improve individuals’ prosocial behavior on this basis.Experiment 1 examined individuals’ group attitudes in a germ threat scenario and explored the role of psychological distance and social value orientation in influencing them.The study used a mixed design of 2(psychological distance: far/near)× 2(value orientation: pro-social/pro-ego)× 2(ingroup/out-group membership),with the first two as between-subjects factors and the latter as within-subjects factors,and the dependent variables were subjects’ cooperation and donation intentions toward the ingroup and out-group.The results showed that(1)individuals treated ingroup members better(cooperation and intention to donate)than out-groups in the germ threat scenario;(2)individuals would show more pronounced favoritism toward near-psychologically distant ingroup members and have significantly higher out-group disparaging attitudes compared to ingroup members who were perceived to be psychologically distant,and this was more pronounced among individuals with a pro-ego value orientation;(3)Individuals with a pro-social value orientation treat out-group members with significantly higher cooperation and donation intentions than individuals with a pro-ego value orientation.Based on the findings of Experiment 1,Experiment 2 administered pro-social behavior norm priming to individuals with a pro-ego orientation using a two factors between-subjects design to compare the differences in the treatment of in-and out-group members between the priming and control groups.The results indicated that(1)individuals treated ingroup members better than outgroup members in the germ threat scenario;and(2)after pro-social behavior norm priming for individuals with pro-ego value orientations,their derogatory attitudes toward outgroups improved significantly,indicating that pro-social norm priming was effective.In conclusion,In the infectious agent threat scenario,individuals prefer ingroup members,especially those who perceive psychological proximity,while psychological proximity and social value orientation influence individuals’ group attitudes in this scenario,and initiation of pro-social behavior norms can improve individuals’ altruistic behavior.