The Influence Of Ego-depletion On Cooperative Behavior

The concept of ego-depletion is derived from the theory of self-control.Every link of making decisions,making plans and initiating behaviors requires the participation of self-control.The resources of self-control are limited,and ego-depletion is easy to occur when an individual carries out self-control in order to complete a task.A person's state of ego-depletion is bound to affect their subsequent will and behavior.It is generally believed that ego-depletion will reduce the individual's altruistic behavior,and cooperation as a typical altruistic behavior,it will also be affected by self-depletion.From the perspective of the after-effect of self-control resource depletion,this study investigated the influence of ego-depletion on cooperative behavior and the regulating effect of empathy and narcissistic personality traits.The study included three experiments,all involving college students.In the first experiment,the dual-task paradigm was adopted to manipulate the independent variables through the "non-manual writing" task to make the subjects at different levels of ego-depletion,and the dictator task was used to investigate the individual's cooperative behavior.In experiment 2,subjects were divided into high-depletion group and low-depletion group by e-crossing task,and empathy scale(IRI-C)was introduced to investigate the regulating effect of empathy personality traits on them.On the basis of experiment two,experiment three replaced the empathy trait with the personality trait negatively related to narcissism,and introduced the narcissistic personality questionnaire,aiming to explore the moderating effect of narcissism in ego-depletion and cooperative behavior.The research results are as follows:(1)Ego-depletion negatively predicted the cooperative behavior of individuals in the dictator task,in other words,compared with the low-depletion group,the high-depletionsubjects would allocate fewer tokens to each other in the dictator task.This is consistent with previous studies.(2)Experiment 2 did not find the moderating effect of empathy on ego-depletion and cooperation,but there was a significant positive correlation between perspective taking ability and cooperative behavior,in other words,the higher perspective taking ability,the stronger cooperation intention.(3)Narcissistic personality plays a moderating effect between ego-depletion and cooperation,and there is a significant negative correlation between implicit narcissism and cooperation,in other words,the higher implicit narcissism,the less cooperative behavior.