| Cooperative behavior is of great significance to individual’s survival and social’s harmony and stability.In order to better coordinate the conflicts between personal interests and collective interests,individuals often need the participation in self-control when carrying out a series of cooperative behaviors.According to the Strength Model of Self-Control,self-control depends on a limited resource,when an individual makes a series of self-control behaviors,he or she will often be in a state of ego depletion due to temporary energy depletion,leading to impair the cooperative behavior.Therefore,it is urgent to find ways to effectively enhance individual’s cooperation.In addition,previous studies on the relationship between ego depletion and cooperative behavior mostly focused on the positive gain context,and paid less attention to the loss context.In view of the above,two experiments were conducted among Junior high school students to investigate the effect of ego depletion on cooperative behavior,and the role of personal traits(empathy ability)and external environment(security priming)in the mechanisms of compensating the depleted resource,so as to provide effective evidence for the internal mechanism of ego depletion on cooperative behavior.Experiment 1 were conducted to investigate the role of empathy ability in compensating the depleted resource for ego depletion on cooperative behavior under different contexts.Experiment 1 conducted a 2(ego depletion: high,low)x 2(empathy ability: high,low)x 2(context types: gain,loss)mixed experimental design of three factors.the “non-dominant hand reaction” task was used to manipulate the level of ego depletion,the score of Revision of QCAE Empathy Scale for Chinese Adolescents was used to manipulate the level of empathy ability,the amount of money invested in the public account in the public goods dilemma in the gain context and the amount of self-retained debt in the public goods dilemma in the loss context was used to measure the cooperative behavior.The results showed that:(1)compared with the gain context,individuals in the loss context showed more cooperative behaviors;(2)the main effect of ego depletion on cooperative behavior was not significant;(3)empathy ability had no significant compensatory effect on the effect of ego depletion on cooperative behavior.However,individuals with high empathy ability had no significant difference in cooperative behavior under different ego depletion states,while people with low empathy ability were more likely to cooperate when they were in a state of high ego depletion.This study did not confirm the Resource Model of Self-control,and we speculated that cooperative behavior may be characterized by intuitive automaticity.Experiment 2 were conducted to investigate the role of security priming in compensating the depleted resource for ego depletion on cooperative behavior under different contexts.Experiment 2 conducted a 2(ego depletion: high,low)x 2(security priming states: security priming,acquaintance priming)x2(context types: gain,loss)mixed experimental design of three factors.the “non-dominant hand reaction” task was used to manipulate the level of ego depletion,the recall task paradigm were used to manipulate the security priming state,the amount of money invested in the public account in the public goods dilemma in the gain context and the amount of self-retained debt in the public goods dilemma in the loss context was used to measure the cooperative behavior.The results showed that:(1)compared with the gain context,individuals in the loss context showed more cooperative behaviors;(2)the main effect of ego depletion on cooperative behavior was not significant;(3)the main effect of security priming on cooperative behavior was significant;(4)security priming had no significant compensatory effect on the effect of ego depletion on cooperative behavior.This study did not confirm the Resource Model of Self-control,but we found that the socioemotional system plays an important role in cooperative behavior.From the perspective of dual-task process model and neural network integration model,this study further explained the internal mechanism of ego depletion on cooperative behavior.The conclusions were as follows: Firstly,compared with the gain context,individuals in the loss context showed more cooperative behaviors.Secondly,the effect of ego depletion on cooperative behavior was small,but we found that security priming had an important effect on cooperative behavior,so the socioemotional system of junior high school students’ cooperative behavior is superior to the cognitive control system.Thirdly,neither empathy ability nor security priming had a compensating effect on cooperative behavior under the influence of ego depletion.There is still some debate about whether cooperative behavior is "intentional" or "intuitive". |
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