The Effect Of Peer Similarity And Cognitive Load On Prosocial Behavior Of Junior High School Students And College Students

The dual-processing model believes that pro-social decision-making is influenced by both the emotionally-initiated intuitionistic system and the highly cognitively-influential inference system.This study uses similarity to affect the emotional system,uses cognitive load affects the cognitive system,and uses the dictator game paradigm and its variant to study the influence of the dual-processing system on pro-social behavior and motivation of junior high school students and college students.This study examines the above problems with two experiments.In Experiment I,students of Grade 1 and college students were selected to do the classic dictator game.And we used a virtual questionnaire to manipulate the degree of similarity between participants and peers,and used digital memory tasks to manipulate the degree of cognitive load of participants to explore the impact of similarity and cognitive load on the pro-social decisions(that is,the the number of allocations)of junior high school students and college students,then we found that:1.After controlling for gender factors,the number of subjects assigned is influenced by similarities,and subjects are assigned more to high-similarity peers than low-similarity peers.2.Cognitive load has no significant effect on the distribution of grade 1 students and college students.In Experiment 2,In order to clarify the influence of similarity and cognitive load on the intrinsic motivations of pro-social behavior of junior high school students and college students,students of Grade 1 and college students were selected to do the modified dictator game which contains three conditions of non-costly social conditions,costly social conditions,and pure self-interest conditions.The dependent variable is the motivation of the participants in the game,and the measurement index is the percentage of altruistic or self-interest choices in the modified dictator game.By using the same methods as Experiment 1 to manipulate the degree of similarity and the degree of cognitive load,we explore the impact of similarity and cognitive load on the intrinsic motivation of pro-social decisions of junior high school students and college students,then we found that:1.In the costly social conditions,after controlling for gender factors,the similarity affects the percentage of altruistic Options that subjects chose,In the face of high similarity peers,subjects are more likely to choose altruistic options;age affects the percentage of altruistic options for the subjects,compared with college students,Grade 1 students will choose more altruistic options.2.In the pure self-interest conditions,after controlling for gender factors,cognitive load affects the percentage of self-interested option.When under high cognitive load condition,subjects will choose more self-interest option for the subjects;age affects the percentage of Self-interested for the subjects,compared with college students,Grade 1 students will choose less self-interest options.The conclusions of this study are:1.In the classical dictator game and the costly social conditions of modifying dictator games,peer similarity affects the pro-social behavior and altruistic motives of the Grade 1 students and college students.2.In the pure self-interest conditions,the cognitive load affects people's self-interest motivation.3.In the costly social conditions and pure self-interest conditions,in terms of motivation,college students are more self-interested than Grade 1 students.