Confucianism Promotes Prosocial Behaviors: The Moderating Role Of The Need For Norm Conformity And The Group Membership Of Prosocial Targets

Confucianism has been one of the important part of Chinese traditional culture all the time.The impacts of Confucianism on Chinese society begin from the ideology and finally infiltrate in every aspect of entire society.There were a lot of discussion about the influence of Confucianism mostly started from the theoretical level.However,there are few studies explore the specific influence of Confucianism on people's thoughts and behaviors in empirical methods.If it is possible to explore the impacts of Confucianism on Chinese people through lab experiments? One view is that Confucianism can be seen as the religion of China,and it does have some religious characteristics.Religious priming is a classic paradigm which is used widely in Western religious researches to test the causal relationship between religion and a series of psychological and behavioral consequences by priming individual religious concepts.This provides new ideas to study the influence of Confucianism.In this study,we usesd prosocial behavior,one of the important issues of psychological concern,as the outcome variable.Through the religious priming methods,we examines the impact of Confucian priming on individual prosocial behavior in two interview studies(pilot studies 1a and 1b),a laboratory experiment(study 2),and a context questionnaire study(Study 3).Pre-study 1 included two sub-studies.Pilot study 1a used a semi-structured interview to explore the general public's opinions about "what can represent Confucianism" and "what is the influence of Confucianism on society." It turns out that in the view of the public,"Confucius" is an important node about Confucian knowledge,and the influence of Confucianism is related to prosociality.Pilot study 1b used an open-ended questionnaire to further test this finding in an expanding sample,and also to provide materials for subsequent laboratory experiments.The results of the openended questionnaire showed that “Confucius” was the most representative Confucian element with the highest frequency,while other elements with higher frequency were “Benevolenceit”,“The Analects of Confucius”,“Mencius”,“Ritual”,and “Medium”.Like “Confucius”,they all can be used as the materials for the follow-up experiments of Confucianism priming.Study 2 examined the causal relationship between the priming of Confucian ideas and prosocial behavior through an laboratory experiment,and it tested whether the need to conform norms plays a moderate role between Confucian priming and prosocial behavior.It used 2(Confucian Confucian priming vs.neutral priming)× 2(need to conform norms vs.no need to conform norms)between-subject design,and priming people's Confucian concept in an implicit way.The amount of money that the participants allocated to their peer in the dictator game was used as an indicator of prosocial behavior.The results showed that the main effect of Confucian priming on prosocial behavior was not significant,but the interaction between Confucian priming and the need of norm conformity was significant.The need of norm conformity played a moderate role between the Confucianism priming and the promotion of prosocial behavior.It means that only when individuals have the need to conform norms,priming their Confucian concepts will promote their prosocial behavior.The main effect of Confucian priming on prosocial behavior in Study 2 was not significant,this may because of the implicit priming method.In study 3,we used the explicit priming method,and added the God-priming group for comparison.Study 3 used 3(between subject: Confucian priming/God priming/Neutral priming)× 2(within subject: members of the inner group/outside group)mixed design to test the promotion effect of Confucian priming on prosocial behavior,and whether the group membership of the prosocial object act as a boundary condition of Confucian priming.The results showed that the main effect of different priming conditions was not significant,and the main effect of the group membership of prosocial object was significant.But the interaction between different priming conditions and the group membership of prosocial object was not significant.In the Confucian priming,the individual's willingness to help ingroup members was significantly higher than participants in the God priming and neutral priming.The individual's willingness to help outgroup members was not significantly different among the three priming conditions.Group membership played a moderate role in the promotion effect of Confucian priming to the individual prosocial behavior,and acted as the boundary condition for Confucian priming to promote individual prosocial behavior.In summary,this study found that priming with the Confucianism concept could promote the prosocial behavior of Chinese people,and the need of norm conformity played a moderated role in this casual relationship.Besides that,it also founded that the promotion effect only occurs when the prosocial objects are ingroup members.