Abstract
In real life, people always interact with persons of different characteristics. The result of social interaction not only depends on the characteristics of the individual itself, but also is affected by another participant. People can form a social perception of another person according to his/her moral choice or judgment, they also will actively perceive the behavior tendency of strange opponent in the previous interaction, and then use the information of peers to predict the future behavior of their peers.This study will investigate cooperative behavior of individuals which interact with opponents of different characteristics.
People may change their own interactive strategy according to the moral tendency(deontology or consequentialism) and behavior pattern of others. This study will show the opponents' moral orientation (deontology and consequentialism) before the game, or by setting up the cooperative type (cooperative or competitive) of the opponents in the interaction. This study assumes that when individuals perceived that opponents are more competitive than themselves, people Will rationally choose cooperation to avoid more losses, and in the face of relatively cooperative opponents, will choose more aggression to make their own greater benefits. Individuals will not only form a certain social perception of their peers according to the game situation in all previous rounds, and use this information to determine the choice of the current round, but may also determine the choice of their current round according to the results of the recent, that is, the last round.The influence about outcome of previous round to current round will be concerned.
In this study, two between-participants Chicken Game were designed to investigate this issue. In this study, participants will play the games with different "opponents" and maximize their own gains. In Experiment 1, the participants first perceived the opponent as deontology or consequentialism through the opponent's answer about the moral dilemma, and then carried out Chicken Game, the opponent’s decisions were randomly predetermined by a series of equally-probable cooperation and aggression decisions. In Experiment 2, the participants perceived the characteristics of the opponents as cooperative(randomly predetermined by a series of 80%-probable cooperation) or competitive (randomly predetermined by a series of 20%-probable cooperation) in the first half of the experiment through 50 rounds of interaction with the opponent, while the cooperation rate of the opponent returned to 50% in the latter part of the Experiment 2.
The results indicated that: (1) There is no significant difference in the cooperation rate between the deontology group and consequentialism group, and there is no significant difference in the cooperation rate between the competitive group and the cooperative group. (2) When interacting with the deontology and the cooperative opponent, the behavior of the participants is not significantly affected by the result of the previous trial. (3) When the opponent is consequentialism, compared with individual chooses to cooperate and the opponent chooses to aggressive in the previous trial, when both players chose to cooperate, the participants were more tended to cooperate in the current trial. (4) In the competitive group, when both player choose to cooperate, the participants were more inclined to cooperate compared to the previous individual choice of aggression and the opponent chooses to cooperate.
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How peer characteristics affect people's cooperation and conflict behavior?[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(1): 148-154
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