The Effects Of Self-other Overlap And Perspective Taking Categories On Helping Behavior

The relationship between perspective taking and helping behavior has always been the focus research within the fields of developmental psychology and social psychology. The previous research shows that perspective taking not only positively correlates to helping behaviors but also deepen the self-other overlap. Most of the researches, however, neglects two major subtypes (cognitive perspective taking and affective perspective taking) of perspective taking and their effects on helping behavior. Besides, effects of self-other overlap is short of being considered during the similar researches. Therefore, this thesis, through three experiments, studies self-other overlap and varieties of perspective taking as well as their effects on helping behavior.Experiment1, a single-factor two-level within groups design, studies the different influences of high and low self-other overlap on helping behavior, which shows that the higher level of self-other overlap leads to the more obvious helping behavior. Experiment2, a two-factor mixed design, studies what and how perspective taking and self-other overlap influence helping behavior, which proves the main effect and interactive effect of perspective taking and self-other overlap level is significant. Experiment3, a two-factor mixed design, studies the influences of self-other overlap on helping behavior in accordance with different perspective taking categories. It demonstrates that the main effect and interactive effect of overlap level and perspective taking categories is significant. Besides, affective perspective taking group demonstrates more tendency of helping behavior in contrast with the cognitive perspective taking group, while low-level self-other overlap group shows more tendency than the high-level self-other overlap group.To sum up, this thesis proves that self-other overlap have a significant effect on helping behavior, and perspective taking moderates the effect of self-other overlap on helping behavior. Compared with cognitive perspective taking, affective perspective taking dramatically improves the self-other overlap level and enhances the degree of helping willingness.