The Role Of Recipient Responsibility In Moral Identity Affect The Act Of Giving

Donation is always considered as a kind of moral, prosocial behaviors, and it is to help people in need, enhance the welfare of others. There are many factors that can influence donation behavior, there are many research focus on the problem of "who is more likely to donate" "how to attract more donors", to explore how the donor’s characteristics affect donation behavior. In recent years, some studies show that, when the recipient is responsible for their own plight, people tend to think that deserved it. Although the moral identity is a positive role in promoting pro-social behavior, but in real life, moral identity will not increase charity behavior unconditional. In the process of moral identity effect on prosocial behavior, it also affected by other factors such as moral cognition and moral emotion. From the perspective of cognition, emotion and characteristics integrated to study the effect of moral identity on prosocial behavior has high theoretical value and practical significance.This study selected college students and graduate students as the subjects, proposed to examine the moderating role of recipient responsibility in moral identity affect the act of donation behavior. On this basis, from the perspective of cognitive and emotional to explore justice and empathy role of the moderating effect, intends to carry out two studies. Study 1, using different instructions to manipulate the recipient responsibility level, through the real money donated tasks, inspect the recipient responsibility in the role of moral identity and giving relationship. Study 2 from the more ecological and system perspective, regard the donation behavior as an external performance that combine the individual’s emotional, cognitive and personality traits, to further testing the effects under different conditions of recipient responsibility, and integrate an model of cognitive, emotional and multifactorial traits. Research proves that the recipient responsibility moderate the relationship between the moral identity and giving behavior, at the same time, empathy and justice as the mediation variable that intermediary this effect. The main results are as follows:(1) Recipient responsibility moderate the relationship of moral identity and donation behavior.(2) Under the condition of low recipient responsibility, empathy and justice act as multiple intermediary role in the relation between moral identity affect giving.(3) Under the condition of high recipient responsibility, only justice act as intermediary role in the relation between moral identity affect giving.(4) Under the condition of high recipient responsibility, the beneficiary under the condition of high responsibility, individual’s own unethical behavior can enhance the empathy for the recipient, empathy in the relation between moral identity affect donation behavior act as a mediating role.These results indicate that, for the low responsibility "poor man", moral identity through empathy and justice intermediary role to increase donation, but for high responsibility "poor man", donors will pay more attention to the fairness of the donation. More importantly, the memories of their immoral behavior will remind people "who are not saints," to increase the understanding of "hated the place," and raise the high level of empathy to the high responsibility recipient, thereby affecting donations behavior. Therefore, this study has important implications for the field of prosocial behavior, and also develop an effective fund-raising policy for the government or non-profit organizations, as well as provide a favorable guidance of improve national and moral qualities.