Self-depletion Promotes Cooperation Behaviors And It's Explanation Based On Two-process Theory Framework

Cooperative behavior is ubiquitous in today's social activities and plays a more and more important role.With the acceleration of the social rhythm,people often need to complete cooperation-related decisions in a state of psychological resource loss.In general,people need self-control to reconcile the conflict between collective interests and personal interests.Therefore,a relationship between psychological resource depletion and cooperative behavior may exists.Self-depletion is an important concept in the field of psychology,which refers to a state of psychological exhaustion when individuals run out of internal control resources.There are few studies focusing on the relationship between self-depletion and cooperative behavior,and most of them are to explore the impact of self-depletion on prosocial behaviors.This research aims at explore how self-depletion influences cooperation behaviors and the possible psychological process behind it.The result of study 1 shows that self-depletion promotes cooperation in the public resource dilemma setting.We provide a possible explanation based on dual-process model and social heuristic hypothesis(SHH)and try to verify it in study 2&3.The explanation logic is that self-depletion could make people more dependent on intuition process,and the intuitive process supports cooperation.Through context effects and CRT(the Cognitive Reflection Test)the study 2 tests the hypothesis that self-depletion can activate intuitive process.By priming intuitive and reflective mindset the study 3 finds out that people behave more cooperatively when adapt a more intuitive process.To some extent,this research is not only reveals the relationship between self-control state and cooperation,bur also prove the existence of SHH in Chinese social culture background.