From Good Words To Good Deeds: Research On How Commitment Promotes Prosocial Behavio

Prosocial behavior includes all behaviors that have a positive impact on others,groups and society.There is no doubt that prosocial behavior plays a vital role in achieving social harmony and building a better society.Therefore,to explore effective ways to nudge prosocial behavior is indispensable to today’s innovative social governance.As one of the classic ways of nudging,commitment can make more prosocial behavior by improving individual self-control and making individual behavior consistent with self-concept,cognitive attitude and social norms.However,the existing research perspectives on commitment are mostly related to self-control,such as improving individual behavior in academic,health and other aspects.In addition,commitment studies related to prosocial behavior also focus on the perspective of individual and behavioral decision-making.Based on this,in order to promote the occurrence of prosocial behavior,this study attempts to explore the impact of commitment on prosocial behavior from the perspective of nudge,and to further understand the spillover effect of commitment on prosocial behavior.and try to find better ways to promote prosocial behavior through commitment.This study is divided into three parts,a total of 7 empirical studies.Respectively from the commitment as a way to nudge "impact","spillover" and "better nudge" prosocial behavior to carry out research.The purpose of study 1 is to explore the relationship between commitment nudge and prosocial behavior,and to explore the effectiveness of commitment nudge from three kinds of prosocial behavior: cooperative behavior,helping behavior and pro-environmental behavior.Study 2 explored whether there were spillover effects between different prosocial behaviors by manipulating the presence or absence of commitment.Study 3 introduces the classic priming nudge visual cues to explore whether the combined nudge of commitment and visual cues can promote prosocial behavior more effectively.In this study,SPSS27.0 was used to analyze the data,and the results showed that:(1)Nudges have a positive effect on three types of prosocial behavior: cooperative behavior,helping behavior,and environmentally friendly behavior.In the results of the study on nudging these three types of prosocial behavior,the participants in the nudge group showed significantly more cooperative behavior,helping behavior,and environmentally friendly behavior than those in the no-nudge group,indicating that nudges can promote prosocial behavior.(2)Nudging prosocial behavior produces positive spillover effects.After nudging helping behavior or disease prevention behavior,subsequent environmentally friendly behavior is positively affected,indicating that nudging prosocial behavior produces positive spillover effects.(3)Nudges and visual cues can effectively nudge prosocial behavior,and there is a significant interaction between nudge and visual cues when nudging helping behavior.When there is no nudge,compared to no visual cues,the participants who receive visual cues show more helping behavior;but when there is a nudge,visual cues do not significantly nudge the occurrence of prosocial behavior.At the same time,there is no significant difference between the combined nudge and the single nudge in the effect of helping behavior,but it is significantly higher than the effect of nudge with only visual cues.There is no significant difference between the combined nudge and the single nudge in nudging prosocial behavior.(4)In exploring the policy effects and psychological effects of nudges,the cooperative behavior of participants who received nudges but did not make a commitment was significantly higher than that of participants who did not receive nudges,indicating that individuals who did not make a commitment were also significantly affected by nudges when nudging cooperative behavior.This indicates that the policy effects of nudges do not solely come from psychological effects.This study demonstrates the effectiveness of nudging prosocial behavior from the perspective of nudges,and identifies the positive spillover effects of nudging prosocial behavior,as well as the interaction between nudges and visual cues in nudging prosocial behavior.This enriches and improves the research on nudges and provides valuable information and theoretical support for relevant departments in policy formulation and implementation,contributing to promoting people to make more prosocial behavior and innovative social governance.