The Impact And Mechanism Of Social Distance On Risk Decision Making

All the choices we face in life are risky somehow.Risk decision-making refers to the uncertainty decision-making,in which the probability of outcome of the event is certainty,such as implementation of government policy,or the daily choice that involved risk.In life,individual choices are sometimes not only related to their own interests,but also to different people who has different social distance with one selves(patients,customers,relatives,etc.).How does the risky choice vary when the social distance varies from oneself to someone else? According to emotion process theory,the change of social distance will cause the change of individual emotion arousal degree,which has an impact on decision process.More and more recent studies have suggested that if we take the trait and state of emotions into consideration,we can understand the role of emotions in decision-making better.With the rapidly change in life,more and more individuals suffer from anxiety attacks in their work and life.How will this affect their risky decision making? Based on the construction level theory of psychological distance and dual-process theory,this study deeply explores the following three subjects :(1)the influence of social distance on risky decision-making;(2)the psychological mechanism of social distance influences risky decision-making: the moderating effect of trait anxiety and the mediating effect of state anxiety;(3)the cognitive neural mechanism of social distance affects risk decision making.This study consists of three parts: the first part explores the influence of social distance on risk decision by adopting two sub-studies.Adopting the self-other decision-making method,Experiment 1a manipulated the social distance while experiment 1b focus on exactly how close social distance is to manipulate the social distance to explore the influence of social distance on risky decision-making.The second part we manipulation of individual state anxiety,to explore the impact that trait anxiety has on the influence of social distance on risky decision making;In the third part,event-related potential technology(ERPs)is used to explore the cognitive neural mechanism of social distance on risk decision-making from the perspective of time process.The results showed that:(1)social distance has significant influence on individual risk decision-making,when social distance is close,the risk of individuals make decisions more conservative,otherwise,the risk of individuals make decisions more risky;(2)under the circumstance of losses and gains,social distance has different impact on risky choice: when it is gain framework,social distance makes people more risky and when it is loss,no matter how close the social distance is,there was no significant difference between risky decision-making;(3)the state anxiety emotion plays a mediating role in the social distance influencing risky decision,and the state anxiety is higher when the social distance is close,which makes people more risky;(4)trait anxiety plays a moderating role in the social distance influence risk decision.In the near social distance,individual whose trait anxiety is higher has higher state anxiety,which lead to more conservative;(5)the ERPs results show that,in the early stage of decision-making,when the individual makes risk decision,the larger N1 component is triggered when the social distance is close.At the later stage of the decision-making,the risk decision of the near social distance leads to the larger P3 component,indicating that the individual has invested more attention resources.