The Effect Of Scarcity On Individual Cooperative Behavior

Cooperative behavior is one of the most common prosocial behaviors.Many scholars at home and abroad pay attention to the emergence of cooperative behavior and its influence mechanism.However,most of the existing studies explore the impact on psychological state,emotion and trust on individual cooperative behavior from the perspective of individuals themselves,and few studies pay attention to the impact on resource changes in the environment on individual cooperative behavior.However,with the rapid development of social economy,resource scarcity has become a more common phenomenon,affecting individual behavior and decision-making.Some researchers believe that when individuals perceive the scarcity of resources,they will pay more attention to the protection of resources,and then increase hostility to the outside world,leading to competitive behavior.Therefore,there are contradictions in the research conclusions about the influence of scarcity of cooperative behavior,so it is necessary to further explore the influence of scarcity of cooperative behavior and its mechanism.Therefore,on the basis of combing the relevant literature,this study focuses on the influence of scarcity of individual cooperative behavior through experiments,and further introduces emotional and Social mindfulness factors to explore the intermediary and regulatory mechanism between them.This study consists of a pre-experiment and four formal experiments,mainly through pictures,words,cognitive tasks to initiate the sense of scarcity,using the prisoner's dilemma and public goods dilemma paradigm to measure the subjects' cooperative behavior.The purpose of the previous experiment is to test the initial material of the sense of scarcity and to select the appropriate experimental material for the follow-up formal experiment.Experiment 1 examines whether scarcity perception can predict individual cooperative behavior through on-the-spot research.Experiment 2 activates subjects' sense of scarcity and satisfaction by combining pictures and texts,and further examines the influence of scarcity of individual cooperative behavior from the perspective of causality.Experiment 3 introduces emotion as a potential mediating variable on the basis of experiment 2,and explores the intermediary role of emotion in the process of scarcity affecting individual cooperative behavior by initiating subjects' sense of scarcity and satisfaction.In experiment 4,on the basis of experiment 3,Social mindfulness is introduced as a potential moderating variable,and shape matching and point comparison cognitive tasks are used to initiate the subjects' sense of scarcity and sense of adequacy,to further detect the boundary conditions of the impact of scarcity of individual cooperative behavior,so as to construct an mediated regulating model of the impact of scarcity of cooperative behavior.The results show that:(1)The sense of scarcity has a positive predictive effect on individual cooperative behavior,and the stronger the sense of scarcity is,the more inclined the individual is to cooperate.(2)There are significant differences in individual cooperative behavior under different conditions of scarcity,that is,individuals under the condition of sense of scarcity have a higher tendency to cooperate than those under the condition of sufficient sense of scarcity.(3)Emotion plays an intermediary role in the influence of scarcity on cooperative behavior.That is,compared with the condition of abundance,individuals' emotion under scarcity is more positive and they are more willing to cooperate.Conversely,individuals with a sense of abundance produced calmer emotions and lower levels of cooperation than those with a sense of scarcity.(4)Social mindfulness regulates the influence of scarcity on cooperative behavior through emotion,that is,there is an intermediary regulation model.Specifically,regardless of the social good thoughts level,compared with adequate sense of individual,scarce sense of individual emotions are higher,and tend to be more cooperative behavior,but compared to the low social good thoughts perceptual condition,under the condition of high social good thoughts perceptual individual sense of scarcity more influence to its sentiment,which have more impact on cooperative behavior.This study shows that the sense of scarcity promotes individual cooperative behavior,and finds that emotion mediates the relationship between the sense of scarcity and cooperative behavior,and Social mindfulness further mediates the relationship between the sense of scarcity and emotion,so as to construct an mediated regulation model.To some extent,this enriches the theoretical research on individual cooperative behavior under the condition of scarce resources,and also provides a new solution to the existing cooperative problems in real life.