The Influence Of Ancestral Priming On Individual Prosocial Behavior In The Context Of Confucian Culture

Ancestors are very important to people in Chinese society.In a way the ancestors answered the philosophical questions of"who am I?"and"where do I come from?"Chinese people remember and remember their ancestors,worship and revere their ancestors,and have deep feelings for them."carefully attend the funeral rites of parents and follow them when gone with due sacrifices"has become a traditional thought of Chinese people,affecting millions of Chinese people.Prosocial behavior refers to the good behavior to others,because of altruism,has always been a hot research topic in the field of psychology,foreign researchers have found that spirituality,god or spirit,religious and other factors will affect the prosocial behavior of people,the aim of this study is through a series of studies to explore Chinese ancestry,including personal ancestors and national common ancestor two types as well as ingroup and outgroup impact on prosocial behaviors of college students'group identity.On the one hand,it will supplement the related research of folk culture psychology,and on the other hand,it will explore the role of ancestors in modern society,so as to promote people's prosocial behaviors by using ancestors to some extent.The first study explores the concept of ancestors and its function of contemporary college students.A?~2analysis of 120 questionnaires showed that college students still believed that ancestors would bless their offspring.After an individual makes a choice of interest preference,the individual ancestor will forgive the selfish choice of the offspring,and the common ancestor of the nation will punish the selfish choice of the offspring.In the second study,the effects of ancestral beliefs on individuals'cooperative behavior choices and trust in partners were explored using short essay writing primers and variants of Prisoner's Dilemma.There were 57 college students in the study group,?~2test showed no significant difference in choice,and t-test showed that subjects in the ancestral priming group trusted others less and donated less to others than those in the control priming group.In the third study,study added the concept of ingroup and outgroup,and used writing prims and dictator games to explore the effects of ancestor type and ingroup identity on money distribution.The subjects were 66 college students.Analysis of variance found that people assigned more to ingroup.Individual priming and control priming allocated more money to the ingroup,and the difference was significant,but there was no significant difference in the condition of national common ancestors priming.Under the specific operational definition,when the assignment object is an outgroup,the money allocated to each other by the national common ancestor primed group is significantly more than that of the personal ancestral primed group.Study 4 included two implicit experiments.Experiment A was an offline study,using lexical judgment tasks for implicit priming,using prosocial and antisocial words as target stimuli,and using donation time as another dependent variable.The results of variance analysis showed that the participants'response to antisocial words was significantly faster than that to prosocial words after priming with personal ancestors,but the result was opposite under the condition of common ancestor of the nation.When it came to ingroup donation,the time spent on personal ancestors priming group was significantly longer than that of national common ancestors priming group and control group.When facing the outgroup,there was no difference in the time of donation betweenpersonal ancestors and national common ancestors.Experiment B was an online study,which used the implicit priming paradigm of sentence reconnection and the Prisoner's Dilemma paradigm of Likett's Seven Assessment to explore the effects of ancestor priming,gender and ingroup and outgroup on college students'cooperative behavior.The subjects were 151 college students.Analysis of variance found that female students were more willing to betray.In both the in-group and out-group groups,the subjects in the personal ancestors and control-priming groups were more willing to betray,and the subjects in the national common ancestors priming group were more willing to cooperate and engage in prosocial behaviors than in the national common ancestors priming group.Through the above five studies,this paper explores the influence of Chinese college students'ancestral concepts on their personal prosocial behaviors.The research findings are as follows:(1)Contemporary college students still believe that ancestors will bless future generations,and individual ancestors will forgive the selfish choices of future generations,while common ancestors of nation will punish individuals for their selfish choices.(2)Priming ancestors makes college students more selfish,less trusting of others,less donating money to others,and less prosocial behavior.(3)In the case of individual ancestor initiation,college students would allocate more money to ingroup,but in the case of ethnic common ancestor initiation,there was no difference in money distribution to in-group and out-group,indicating that ethnic common ancestor initiation made individuals fairer and more pro-social behaviors.(4)At the implicit level,activating ethnic common ancestry causes individuals to donate more time,make cooperative choices,and exhibit more prosocial behaviors.