The Study Of The Effect Of Moral Traits Priming On Volunteer Behavior

Volunteering refers to an individual’s long term helping behavior without compensation conducted willingly for the active help seeker after deliberation in the context of an organization, with long-term, planned, voluntary, organized, non-profit and altruistic as the main feature. Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. Primes have been shown to impact social behaviors without conscious regulation, but it’s usually think that this effect only exists in the social behavior such as spontaneous helping behavior. Inspired by previous studies, we try to do a parallel line of research to examine a different type of helping behavior—planned, long-term helping behavior, taking volunteerism as instantiation. Following the classical priming paradigm of automatically social behavior, using sentence-unscrambling task with moral traits, taking undergraduates as participants, we used situational primes designed to elicit increased or decreased volunteering tendency and volunteerism. Study1examined the influence of moral traits prime on helping behavior and volunteering tendency, study2took the same designed to test the priming effect in "daily life". Then we examined the influence of volunteering commitment on volunteering. The results demonstrate that fleeting situational primes can impact not only spontaneous behavior, but also volunteering tendency and future volunteer behavior. The opportunity of volunteering commitment moderates the relationship between priming and volunteering.