The Influence Of Power And Goal Types On Self-sacrifice In Intimate Relationship

Self-sacrifice is an important way to deal with relationship conflicts,and it is a relationship maintenance behavior in intimate relationships.Self-sacrifice in intimate relationship is the act of giving up one’s own interests for the benefit of ones partner or relationship.It is an altruistic behavior with prosocial orientation.Self-sacrifice is a common phenomenon in romantic relationships,and can even be regarded as a romantic strategy.If people want to maintain their long term relationship,they are more willing to sacrifice their self-interest to maintain the relationship’s interest.As the core variable of social relations,power plays an important role in interpersonal relations.The research on the influence of power on prosocial behaviors has found that the influence of power on prosocial behaviors can both promote and suppress.Researchers suggest that this inconsistency may be caused by different goal activation states in the individual’s current situation,that is,under different goal activation states,the influence of power on prosocial behavior is different.When activating individual personal goals,power has a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior;when activating individual partner goals,power has a promoting effect on prosocial behavior.Self-sacrifice in a relationship is essentially a prosocial behavior,so is the effect of power on self-sacrifice also affected by goal activation? Current research results on the influence of power in intimate relationships on willingness to sacrifice show that power inhibits sacrifice behavior,that is,individuals with high power show less willingness to sacrifice.It does not directly discuss the role of different target types.Based on this,this study will use a preliminary experiment and two formal experiments to explore whether the influence of power on the self-sacrifice willingness is affected by the goal activation state,so as to find a way to alleviate the negative influence of power on sacrificial behavior.The pre-experiment used questionnaire method to investigate the relationship between power and goal in intimate relationship.A total of 161 subjects in intimate relationships were recruited and required to fill out the Sexual Relationship Power Scale.Self-report method is used to measure the target type.The results show that the power level predicts the target type significantly,that is,the higher the power level,the more concerned the individual is about the self-goals compared with the non-self-goals.This result supports the hypothesis of this research: the higher the individual’s power level,the more concerned about personal goals,which may lead to less self-sacrifice.In the first study,we used a 2(power: high power vs.low power)×2(conscious goal type: personal goal vs.partner goal)between-subject design to explore whether power and conscious goal types in intimate relationships had different effects on the willingness to self-sacrifice.A total of 60 couples who were in love were recruited.Participants need to complete the power self-report scale to group power.After grouping,the subjects returned to the initial compartment to activate personal goals or partner goals(high power and low power were randomly matched with target activation types),and then completed the sacrifice intention task.The results show that: a.The main effect of power is significant,that is,compared with the low power individuals,the high power individuals have less willingness to sacrifice;b.The main effect of goal type is significant,that is,compared with individual conscious goal,partner conscious goal could increase self-sacrifice intention.The interaction effect is not significant.The second study further explored the influence of power on willingness to sacrifice under different activation states of unconscious targets.In the second study,a 2(power: high power vs.low power)×2(unconscious goal type:unconscious personal goal vs.unconscious partner goal)between-subject design.In this study,130 subjects who were in love were recruited.This research adopts the power-priming method to achieve the purpose of power-priming by letting the subjects recall the high and low power events in the intimate relationship.The unconscious goal priming was performed by sentence arrangement task,and then the willingness to self-sacrifice was measured.The results show that: a.the main effect of power is significant: compared with the low power individuals,the high power individuals have less willingness to self-sacrifice;b.The main effect of goal type was not significant: there was no significant difference between the intention to self-sacrifice under the activation of unconscious personal goal and the intention to self-sacrifice under the activation of unconscious partner goal.The interaction effect is not significant.In conclusion,the following conclusions can be drawn from this study:(a)Power in intimate relationship has a damaging effect on the willingness to self-sacrifice,that is,the greater the power,the lower the willingness to self-sacrifice;(b)Goal types can mitigate the damaging effect of power in intimate relationships.That is,activating partner goals can increase the self-sacrifice willingness of high-power individuals,but this effect may only exist under explicit goal activation conditions.