Effects Of Social Norm And Sense Of Honor And Disgreace On Cooperation In Social Dilemmas

Social norm and emotion play important roles in the cooperation in social dilemmas. Social norm inhibits selfish impulses and guide behaviors in the right track; emotion is considered as the most important motivational institutions behind. Lots of studies show that negative emotions like guilt and shame prevent people from norm-breaking. As the development of positive psychology and deepness of research, the importance of positive emotion to pro-social behavior begins to gain the attention, some pioneering work has been done, such like the research on pride; anticipated emotion has been emphasized because of the motivational role during decision-making, as contrast to the current emotion experiences after decision-making; mixed emotions are pointed out as the future direction considering the mixed-motive nature of social dilemmas; lots of studies show emotion is related to the evaluation of goal-relevance, then the motives in social dilemma should match with anticipated emotion; besides, cross-cultural research has proved that culture has huge impact on both emotion and the cooperation. All of those issues require more investigations to enrich our understanding. Based on the lack of studies on the background of Chinese culture, this research focuses on the relations of social norm, the Sense of honor and Disgrace which consists of shame, guilt, pride and honor, and cooperation. Considering the difference between anticipated and experienced emotion, the research contains two experiments, experiment1digs the relationships of anticipated norm, the Sense of honor and Disgrace, motives and cooperation in public goods dilemma; experiment2explores the relationship of third-party emotion communication, Sense of Honor and Disgrace and cooperation in the Give-some dilemma using the third-party emotion communication as the induce of the Sense of honor and Disgrace. The results shows,(1) Contrast to injunctive norm, descriptive norm is lower, closer to tacit social norm, and less various. Also it is a much stronger predictor to cooperation; (2) Anticipated shame and anticipated guilt, anticipated honor and anticipated pride are highly related, and also they are significantly correlated to each other. the results support the concept of Sense of Honor and Disgrace;(3) Descriptive norm moderates the relationship between anticipated honor and cooperation but not anticipated regret and cooperation. Descriptive norm and anticipated honor, only if one of them is high, the cooperation will be high;(4) Anticipated regret decreases cooperation while anticipated honor increases cooperation; subjects elicited higher cooperation with high anticipated honor, whether anticipated regret is low or not, but high anticipated regret significantly decreases cooperation while anticipated honor is low. Mixed emotions explain more variances of cooperation in public goods dilemma;(5) In the public goods dilemma with provision, there are motives like fulfilling obligations and risk avoidance except maximizing individual or collective benefits. Risk avoidance and the concern for collective benefits predict cooperation significantly;(6) The third-party emotion communication of "Satisfied" to players induces higher sense of honor but pride, the results fits the idea that honor has a higher dependence on social approval, on the other hand, pride as self-conscious emotion could reward itself by positive self-evaluation;(7) The third--party emotion communication of "Satisfied" doesn’t promote cooperation significantly, and sense of honor and pride are not correlated with cooperation in Give-some dilemma, maybe because of Give-some paradigm are less collective than public goods dilemma.