Common Peril Lives Stronger Alliance:The Co-experience Of Negative Emotional Events Promotes Cooperation

Cooperation plays an essential role in the development and survival of human.The emotional events were one of the key factors that influence cooperative behaviors.Especially,negative emotional events decreased people's tendency to cooperate.However,previous relevant research has primarily focused on the experiencing negative emotional events alone.In fact,people living in a social environment and often co-experience negative emotional events with others.For example,people co-experience failing in test,being eliminated in the game,being rejected and even the families of the victims of the air crash co-experience loss.Less understood is the impact of co-experiencing negative events on interpersonal cooperation.Based on the previous research,we proposed the hypothesis that co-experiencing negative emotional events increased cooperation between co-experiencers by comparing with the condition of experiencing negative emotional events alone.The need to belong mediated the relationship between those co-experiencing negative emotional events and cooperation.We conducted three experiments to test the hypothesis.In experiment 1,we investigated whether people behaved more cooperatively when they co-experienced negative emotional events along with others than when they experienced alone.Specifically,we manipulated the emotional events by the lottery task and measured the cooperation by Public Goods Game.The results showed that compared with experiencing negative emotional events alone,co-experiencing negative emotional events increased the cooperative behaviors between co-experiencers.Whereas,there was no significant difference between co-experiencing positive emotional events and experiencing positive emotional events alone.In experiment 2,we verified the effect of co-experiencing negative emotional events on cooperation and explored its mechanism.First,we tested the effectiveness of manipulation of the negative emotional events,which was adapted by Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices.Then we manipulated the negative emotional events by this task,measured the cooperation,the need to belong,social bond and the common in-group identity.The results of experiment 2 replicated the findings in the experiment 1 that co-experience of negative emotional events promoted cooperation.Moreover,we found that the need to belong,but not social bonds or common in-group identity,mediated the effect.In experiment 3,we further investigated the need to belong played an important role in the mechanism of co-experiencing negative emotional events promoting cooperation.We manipulated the negative emotional events as the experiment 1 and satisfied the need to belong.The results showed that when the participants who experienced negative emotional events was satisfied the need to belong,they did not behave cooperatively with co-experiencers any more.That is,the co-experience of negative emotional events promoting cooperation through the need to belong.In conclusion,this research found that co-experiencing negative emotional events increased the cooperative behaviors between co-experiencers,compared with experiencing negative emotional events alone.Whereas,there was no significant difference between co-experiencing positive emotional events and experiencing positive emotional events alone.The need to belong mediated the relationship between those co-experiencing negative emotional events and cooperation.These findings contributes to understand the factors that initiate the formation of small groups and may be helpful for Group management and team building.