The Influence Of Social Status On Prosocial Behavior And Its Mechanism Exploration

As a widely used structure,socioeconomic status has a profound impact on people's psychological processes.Differences in resources(material,culture,etc.)formed by this structure will in turn lead to different selves.As one of the driving forces to promote the development of human society,prosocial behavior has been increasingly explored by scholars from various fields.They have already found that there exists a slightly complicated relationship between social status and prosocial behavior.Previous studies have examined the relationship between them from several points,such as reciprocity and sense of control.I start my dissertation with the ambiguity feature of prosocial behavior,adopting questionnaire and experimental method to explore the relationship between people's social status and their prosocial behavior,and examining the role of ambiguity tolerance.Study 1 analyzed the performance of subjects on ball selection task and public goods game task,verifing the positive correlation between them.Study 2 analyzed subjects' traits including subjective social status,prosocial behavior tendency,ambiguity tolerance and objective social status through the questionnaire method.Significant positive correlation was observed between any pair among subjective social status,ambiguity tolerance and prosocial behavior tendency.Meanwhile,the partially mediating role of ambiguity tolerance in the relationship between subjective social status and prosocial behavior tendency was also tested.Study 3 manipulated the high-low status sense of participants through the experimental method,who were randomly assigned into high or low status group.At the same time,it measured their ambiguity tolerance score and performance in the public goods game task.The results indicated that individuals with high subjective status showed higher ambiguity tolerance and more prosocial behavior,while individuals with low subjective status displayed the opposite.One's ambiguity tolerance plays a partially intermediary role between subjective status perception and prosocial behavior.The research enriches previous research on the relationship between subjective social status and prosocial behavior,proving the predictive effect of subjective social status on prosocial behavior and the partially intermediary role played by ambiguity tolerance.It entails theoretical significance and practical value to some extent.