Abstract
Altruistic punishment is of great significance to the maintenance and promotion of trust and cooperation among human beings which entail the personal cost to punish norms-violators. In recent years, many psychological scholars explored the underlying mechanism of pro-social and altruistic behavior with the perspective of dual-system theory, however, the study of altruistic punishment was rare. As a typical altruistic behavior, the study of the psychological mechanism is essential.
This study explored the influential mechanism from both the situational and trait factors. Altruistic punishment is the specific behavior that individuals showed after subjected to or just observed the injustice.So that anger may play an important role in the effects of ego-depletion on altruistic punishment. Besides the situational manipulation of cognitive processing, the difference of personality can also directly influence decision-making. So the personal difference of sensitivity and reaction intensity can definitely influence altruistic punishment. Past studies showed these differences can be concluded as an inherent personality difference called justice sensitivity. How does the stable personality trait of justice sensitivity moderate the relationship between ego-depletion and altruistic punishment? Two experiments were designed to test these ideas.
In Experiment 1, a congruent or incongruent Stroop task was used to manipulate participant self -control resources. The ultimatum game (UG) paradigm was used to measure the altruistic punishment. The rejection ratio of unfair proposals was used as indicators of altruistic punishment. At the same time measure the anger of the participants in the task. In Experiment 2 assessed the justice sensitivity of subjects with the Chinese version questionnaire, with the highest and lowest 27% subjects as the high and low justice sensitivity groups. Each group of 44 participants was selected to participate in the experiment. Then the subjects were randomly assigned to different ego-depletion tasks which were manipulated by a " cross out the e" task. After completing the task,participants were required to Complete the ultimatum game.
In sum, we got the following conclusions from the whole study:
(1) The statistical analysis showed that subjects in the two groups showed the statistically significant difference, subjects in the high ego-depletion group whose behavioral decision-making was based on intuition showed more rejection towards unfair distribution proposals.
(2) The emotion of anger mediated the relationship between ego-depletion and altruistic punishment, which means subjects of the intuition group reported statistically significantly more anger. And this emotion made subjects in the high-depletion group showed more rejection.
(3)Justice directedly influenced altruistic punishment, subjects with high JS showed more rejection towards unfair distribution proposals. High justice sensitivity individuals under intuition would have stronger feelings of anger revoked by unfair proposals and had fewer resources to inhibit the negative feelings which induced more punishment. The experimental result confirmed the hypothesis of moderating effect which means the promotion effect only exited in high justice sensitivity individuals. The results showed the high sensitivity did have a stronger response to unfair proposals.
Key words
ego-depletion, altruistic punishment, anger, justice sensitivity
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Effect of Ego-depletion on Altruistic punishment:The Role of Anger and Justice Sensitivity[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2020, 43(1): 117-124
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