The Negative Relationship Between The Level Of Altruism And Moral Evaluation:The Moderating Effect Of Power

Researches of behaviors and third-party’s evaluation towards them have long been focused on self-interested behavior,such as third-party punishment and compensation,while very few of these researches put emphasis on altruism behavior.In addition,most behavioral researches about self-interested behavior only explored third-party judgement for people who have or have not engaged in altruism behavior,but ignored the evaluation for ever-changing behavior in various degrees of altruism.This paper started from altruism,then focused on third party’s moral evaluation on actors behaving in different levels of altruism and its mechanism.Moreover,this paper involved power into the equation and investigated the moderating effect of power on the relationship between third-party evaluation and individuals’ altruism.The first study included three experiments about third-party moral evaluation on individuals with different levels of altruism(fair,minor/medium/major altruism)under various circumstances of gaining and losing resources.The negative relationship was found between the level of altruism and third-party moral evaluation towards the actors:As the level of altruism rose,the third-party moral evaluation gradually got worse.We also found that individuals’ impression management motivation perceived by third-party was the mediating mechanism of the above effect:An increasing level of individuals’ altruistic behavior promoted third-party to perceive higher impression management motivation of them,which declined the moral evaluation from third-party.The next study involved power into the equation and studied the effect of different levels of altruism on third-party moral evaluation under two levels of power distribution:high-low distribution and same level distribution.Experiment 2a and 2b explained the buffer effect of power on the decreasing trend of altruism evaluation under gaining and losing resources circumstances.With the increasing level of altruism,third-party moral evaluation towards high-power individuals was superiored to that towards low-power ones.Experiment 2c further verified the regulating effect of power distance and explained the notable interactions between power distance and power.The study also showed that individuals with low power distance favored high-power altruists over low-power ones,while subjects with high power distance showed no preference on those two kinds of altruists.The present two studies indicated that there was negative relationship between the level of altruism and third-party moral evaluation on individuals,and impression management motivation of individuals perceived by third-party was the mediator.Furthermore,power could buffer the effect that increasing level of individuals’ altruistic behavior decreased the moral evaluation from third-party,which was also negatively moderated by the power distance of third-party.Finally,the significance and shortcoming as well as future development of this research were also discussed.