The Effect Of Ego Depletion On College Students' Cooperative Behavior

Self-control has always been a subject of interest to researchers in the past decades.In a sense,self-control ability is the key to individual success.Good self-control ability can make individuals accomplish their tasks easily and achieve success.However,self-control is not always satisfactory,and self-control failure will also occur.In recent years,many researchers have gradually shifted their focus to the failure of self-control and put forward the theory of ego depletion.The theory holds that when individuals exert their self-control ability,they will consume certain psychological resources,and when psychological resources are insufficient,they will enter a temporary state of ego depletion.In recent years,Cooperative behavior has always been a research hotspot in psychology,sociology and economics.Cooperation plays an important role in college students' interpersonal relationship and social interaction.It has great significance for college students' physical and mental health development and social stability and harmony.There are many factors influencing college students' cooperative behavior,according to the theory of ego depletion,the purpose of this study is to examine whether ego depletion will affect college students' cooperative behavior,and whether initiating unconscious goals can alleviate the impact of ego depletion on College Students' cooperative behavior.Two experiments were designed to study the college students of some universities in Inner Mongolia.In experiment 1,the subjects were 60 college students,independent variable was ego depletion level.They were divided into depletion and non-depletion,stroop task was used to manipulate them.Dependent variable was the performance of college students in cooperative behavior,and the study was conducted with the task of dictator game and dilemma of public goods.The data of the two groups were analyzed and the results showed that the allocation and investment amount of the high ego depletion group in the dictator game and the dilemma task of public goods were significantly less than those in the low depletion group indicating that ego depletion would reduce the cooperative behavior of College students.Experiment 2 examined whether initiating unconscious goals could reduce the negative impact of ego depletion on CollegeStudents' cooperative behavior.Two factors 2(depletion,non-depletion)*2(cooperative target start up,neutral start)were used to design the experiment.The subjects were 80 College students,20 at each experimental level.The independent variables are depletion level and priming type.the dependent variable was the performance of cooperative behavior.Stroop paradigm was also used to manipulate ego depletion.Participants in the target priming group initiate their goals of cooperative by completing cooperation-related sentence recombination tasks,while those in the neutral priming group reorganized statements unrelated to cooperation.Finally,by comparing the amount of money allocated by participants in dictator game tasks,it was verified that the alleviation of the unintentional cooperative goals was effective.Results show that under the condition of depletion,cooperative goal priming group of participants in the cooperation task allocation and investment amount is significantly higher than neutral priming group participants,under the condition of non-depletion,there was no significant difference between the two groups.It shows that initiating unconscious cooperative goals may encourage individuals who have lost psychological resources to recover certain psychological resources and increase the occurrence of cooperative behavior.thus reducing the negative impact of ego depletion on cooperative behavior.CONCLUSION: Under the condition of ego depletion,college students' cooperative behavior is obviously reduced;initiating unconscious cooperative goals can reduce the negative impact of ego depletion on College Students' cooperative behavior.