The Influence Mechanism Of College Students' Generally Fair World Beliefs On Their Behaviors To Help Poor Elderly People

Respecting the old and caring for the young is an excellent cultural tradition of China, and helping others is an essential quality of citizens in modern society. Facing poor and helpless old people, everyone should take generosity and selflessness behaviors and more welfare policies are necessary from the government. However, contempting, discriminating and stigmaing the old is nothing new in our daily life. Morever, people always take cold-treating and avoiding the poor for granted leading the poor distress situation worse. Therefore, it's necessary to understand people's inner state and operation mechanism for their action, which is of vital importance to the elimination of social contradictions and the construction of a harmonious society.As Lerner noted, "there is a limit to which even the most saintly among us can tolerate being in the presence of human misery", and "our own motives sometimes can deter us from acting generously or helping". The motive is called "Belief in a just world (BJW)", refers to "people need to believe that they live in an essentially just world, where they can get what they deserve". BJW was a double-edged sword:on the one hand, it's essential for people dealing with the threat of injustice, enhancing the world's sense of control and increasing investment for future. On the other hand, the using of irrational strategies leads victim blaming (attribution of responsibility), disparaging, alienation or stigmatization to the innocents, and reduces the following helpings. Studies have noticed that the dual dimension structure of BJW could explain the differentiation of its functions:the personal belief in a just world (PBJW) was related to positive influence for self; yet, the general belief in a just world (GBJW) was closely related to the negative reaction to victim. However, researches about inside mechanism of its impact were relatively rare.The present paper on the basis of literature reviewing, deemed that state empathy played a vital medium role in the influence of GBJW to helping, and could be used to relieving impacts. The present paper included 3 studies:Study 1 investigated the relationship between two-dimension structure of BJW and "the attitudes toward the elderly people", aimed at discriminating PBJW vs.GBJW; Study 2 intended to validate the mechanism of GBJW's influence to helping behaviors, tested wheather attribution of responsibility and state empathy (empathic concern and personal distress) played a mediating effect; Study 3 explored wheather the empathy arousing would alleviate the adverse reaction effectively with the experiment.The conclusions of the article were as follows:(1) College students under the background of Chinese culture was tested that their GBJW was significantly higher than PBJW, indicated that, relativing to themselves, they prefered to believe the world is more just to others.(2) Comparing to PBJW, GBJW would positive predicted the negative attitude towards the elderly significantly, embodied in:the higher the GBJW was, the higher attribution of responsibility (blaming), stronger disregard of the need, and lower support for the welfare policy to the elderly.(3) Attribution of responsibility and state empathy played a mediating role between GBJW and helping behavior. The present reseach found that there are two significant pathes in the helping model, attribution of responsibility and state empathy played a chain mediating effect between GBJW and helping. Meanwhile, GBJW influenced the helping through state empathy individually as well. Additionally, empathic concern and personal distress, two dimensions of empathy, had a signnificat path coefficients in the mole, which told us that we could combine the help motivation of egoism and altruistic.(4) Empathy arousing could improve college students' helping behaviors significantly: in the influence of volunteer service, there was an interaction of GBJW and empathy arousing, and empathy arousing enhanced the service time of high GBJW significantly. However, only empathy arousing had a significant main effect to charitable donation, and empathy arousing increase the amount of donation for all of them.The above results, on the one hand, verified the two dimensional structure of BJW and explore the mechanism of the impact of GBJW to helping behaviors; on the other hand, provided an effective way about relieving the GBJW's negative influences: empathy arousing. In the comprehensive discussions, the article summarized it, and made a further analysis about the absence of this study and the future prospects.