The Impact Of Social Distance, Task Framework And Emotional Factors On Individual Prosocial Decision-making

In this study,undergraduate students and graduate students in Nanjing are chosen as participants, there are two preliminary experiments to investigate the efficacy of the experiment materials used and two formal experiments. The first experiment is the Implicit Association Test, the target words are prosocial words and the non-prosocial words, the attribute words are acquaintances words and strangers words. The Implicit Association Test is mainly to explore individual implicit prosocial tendency with the difference in social distance. The second experiment explores impact of social distance, tasks framework and emotion factor on individual prosocial decisions. The second experiment is designed as 2×2x2 between subjects design, with social distance, tasks framework and emotion priming as the independent variable, the choice of participants in the situation described as the dependent variable. The experiments results are as follows:(1)The participants react faster to the compatible task (prosocial words are associated with the acquaintances words and the non-prosocial words are associated with the words indicating strangers) than the incompatible task (the opposite), the IAT effect is significant.(2)Social distance has a significant main effect on the participants' prosocial decisions.(3)Task framework has a significant main effect on the participants' prosocial decisions.(4)Emotion priming has a significant main effect on the participants' prosocial decisions.(5)There is a significant interaction between social distance, emotion factor and task framework in participants' prosocial decisions.(6)The interaction between the type of emotion priming and social distance is not significant in prosocial decisions, the interaction between the type of task framework and emotion priming is significant and the interaction between the type of social distance and task framework is significant.The research conclusions are as follows:(1)The implicit tendency exists in individuals prosocial behaviors with the difference in social distance.(2) Individuals are more willing to make prosocial decisions to acquaintances than to a stranger, individuals are more willing to avoid another person's losses than to let another person obtain something, compared with the negative emotion, under the positive emotion the individuals' prosocial tendency is more obvious.(3)In both positive emotion and negative emotion priming, individuals' prosocial decisions to acquaintances are more than strangers.(4)There is no significant difference in individuals' prosocial decisions although there are differences in emotion priming,while the task framework is to avoid another person's losses and the social distance is acquaintance.