The Study Of The Effect Of Embarrassment On Pro-social Behavior

Embarrassment, occurring in the process of social interactions while individuals are faced with some (potential) negative evaluations of themselves, is a kind of negative moral emotion, under the influence of which, individuals will adjust their behaviors positively to alleviate or eliminate the discomfort caused by the embarrassment. As a moral emotion related to the social evaluations, the embarrassment has a direct effect on one’s moral behaviors such as the pro-social behaviors. With the inspiration of previous studies, this research, with college students as subjects, is undertaken with three experiments to explore the influence of the embarrassment on the pro-social behaviors of its experiencers and spectators. Experiment1inspects the effect of starting the embarrassment by describing embarrassing events. Experiment2discusses the influence of the embarrassment on the experiencers’ pro-social behaviors by recollecting and writing down the relevant events. Experiment3discuses the influence of the embarrassment on the spectators’pro-social behaviors with the audience criticizing the narrators of embarrassing events. Besides, this research also explores the role that self-esteem plays in the embarrassment and its experiencers, as well as that credence in the embarrassment and its spectators.Under the conditions of this study, this study got the following main conclusions:(1) describing, recollecting and writing down the embarrass mental experiences can effectively start the emotion of embarrassment;(2) the individuals who start the emotion of embarrassment have more pro-social behaviors, the increasing of which are only significantly different in the degrees of embarrassment, seeming irrelevant to gender and self-esteem; (3) To the spectators, when individuals feel embarrassed, they are more pro-social and less anti-social. And the degree of the embarrassment is correlated positively with one’s degree of pro-social behaviors, and negatively with one’s degree of antisocial behaviors. Besides, though gender has nothing to do with pro-social behaviors, it shows remarkable differences in the level of antisocial behaviors. Generally speaking, the spectators believe that men are more antisocial than women.(4) The evaluation of credence plays an intermediate role in the spectators’ affection for individuals and their cooperative willingness. They are inclined to trust those who behave embarrassedly. As a result, they would like to give more affection to the individuals and are more willing to cooperate with them.