Choice And Effort Of Individuals With Different Moral Self-concepts In Third Party Interventions

Previous research on third-party interventions has found that when experimental contexts offer both the option to punish the perpetrator and to compensate the victim,third parties prefer the choice of compensation in most cases.This is partly due to the individual and collective level differences in the benefits of compensation and punishment to the third party The moral self-concept is the view of how individuals see their own moral conduct,which is formed by continuously weighing their own interests against those of the group,and this view continues to affectthe level interests they would take into account.This study attempts to explore the reasons behind third-party intervention preferences from the perspective of individual differences in the moral self-concept.Furthermore,in previous third-party intervention studies,subjects only needed to make monetary choices with tokens as costs,and little attention was paid to the subjects’ implementation after choosing an intervention method.This study,using the reinforcement learning paradigm,continued to investigate the psychological and behavioral efforts that subjects would put into after making a choice.This study consists of three experiments.Experiment 1 recruited 111 subjects to examine the influence of intervention situation rationality(i.e.,degree of unfairness)on subjects’ choice of intervention way and effort level.Experiment 2 recruited 120 subjects to investigate the influence of reputation focus on intervention method and effort level.Experiment 3 recruited 115 subjects to examine the influence of the deterrence effect of intervention.All of these experiments assessed subjects’ levels of moral self-concept through the Moral self-image Scale,combining a third-party intervention paradigm with a two-stage task that manipulated different situational conditions through different guiding words.The results showed that,at individual level,high moral self-concept individuals were not influenced by the degree of unfairness in their choice or effort level,while low moral self-concept individuals showed differences in both aspects: compared to the low unfairness condition,there was no compensation preference in the high unfairness condition,and more punishment effort was put under high unfairness conditions.High moral self-concept individuals were not significantly affected by reputation focus on their choice or effort,while low moral self-concept subjects showed differences: under reputation focus conditions,they preferred compensation choices more,but did not put into more compensation effort after making a choice,and their punishment effort was not affected by reputation focus.At the group level,high moral self-concept individuals put more effort into executing interventions when intervention can prevent recidivism,while low moral self-concept individuals were not affected by this condition.In conclusion,individuals with different moral self-concepts differ in their choices and execution of third-party interventions,which may reflect differences in the weight of personal and collective interests in the aforementioned behavior.These findings may provide some insights into the individual differences in promoting human cooperation and social order and provide guidance on how to encourage individuals with different moral self-concepts to engage in more prosocial behavior in real life.