Forgiveness,Prosocial Reputation And Social Selection

Transgression is an unavoidable topic in both social interaction and cooperation.According to Economics,punishments are the desired way to prevent future transgressions and sustain group's cooperation when transgressions happen.If there is no punishment,not only will groups' cooperation collapse,but also those who did not punish will get exploited.Recently,psychological researches point out that forgiveness may induce repeated transgression and leave forgivers in danger.However,this perspective is in conflict with the fact that forgiveness is both common and respected in society.As a result,this thesis tried to explore the reason why forgiveness can survive the transgressions and the mechanism forgivers evolve.Forgiveness,defined as prosocial changes happened after transgressions,treat transgressions and transgressors with positive motives.This may bring risks to forgivers in the short time.Meanwhile,the prosocial reputation brought by forgiveness may also improve forgivers' fitness in social selection.As a result,this thesis decides to explore forgiveness's effect on social selection from the perspective of prosocial reputation.This thesis is made up of 3 experiments,trying to look into forgivers' advantages in social selection from the perspective of prosocial reputation.As a whole,162 students participated in these 3 experiments.Experiment 1 mainly focused on the exploration of manipulation of forgiveness in the laboratory situations and forgiveness's effect on partner choice.The result turns out that,participants are more willing to choose forgivers as partners and they do choose forgivers more when it comes to partner choice.On the basis of results from Experiment 1,Experiment 2 decides to improve the manipulation of forgiveness and testify prosocial reputation's mediation effect.As a result,prosocial reputation's mediation effect is testified.Experiment 3 confirms forgivers'advantages in leader choice situations.Meanwhile,Experiment 3 explores whether people with different social value orientation have different preferences for forgivers.In conclusion,this thesis comes up with following results:1)People are more willing to choose forgivers as partners.2)Forgiveness brings prosocial reputation and reputation works as advantages in social selection.3)At the behavior level,people prefer forgivers more than unforgivers in both partner-choice condition and leader-choice condition.However,people prefer to choose high-level forgivers as partners while prefer low-level forgivers as leaders.4)People differ in social value orientation have the same preference for forgivers.However,the prosocial people tend to be more sensitive to high-level forgiveness.Taking the perspective of third-party,this thesis finds out that,the prosocial reputation induced by forgiveness can make forgivers more desired partners in social selection.In this way,this thesis provides some ideas explaining why forgivers survive transgressions.