An Study On The Mechanisms And Management Strategies Of Implicit And Explicit Legitimacy Of Authorities In Collective Action

As China has entered a period of social change, the stability of society is facing many challenges. The government is overwhelmed to achieve the target of stability maintenance, because of the sharp increase in the number of collective action. Legitimacy is the key to ensure the stability of the social and political system, and the Communist Party of China has begun to care the issue of legitimacy in public in 2015. Both from a theoretical or practical perspectives, legitimacy is particularly important in China. Western psychologists have some earlier research in focusing on the legitimacy of authorities in individual or small group settings, much of recent their attention has been directed toward legitimacy of authorities in large organizations and in societies in order to cope with the challenge of globalization. However, some research on political behavior brought new perspectives and conclusions, and the new explicit measurement can’t explain how implicit attitude can influence political behavior. The field of collective action also call for implicit social cognition research. So, in the context of China can implicit and explicit legitimacy of authorities play the role of social stabilizer? In online collective action, can the legitimacy of authorities have the same effect? If so, how should the government maintain legitimacy? In order to answer the series of practical problems, this dissertation examined the implicit and explicit legitimacy of authorities, their moderating effects in the psychological mechanisms of offline/online collective action, and the way of maintain legitimacy through 7 empirical studies.Study 1 investigated the relationship between implicit and explicit legitimacy of authorities to extend the concept structure of legitimacy of authorities.142 students were measured by using the revised single dimension scale and SC-IAT. The results showed that the reliability and validity of the scale, and split-half reliability of SC-IAT is well reliable. The relationship of implicit and explicit legitimacy of local government was not significant. The preliminary conclusion was that the explicit and implicit legitimacy were relative independent.Study 2 examined the role of legitimacy of authorities in the maintenance of social stability in China through 4 experiments used 2×2 between-subject designs. First, focused on the offline collective action, 126 undergraduate students were recruited to examine how explicit legitimacy moderate the emotion path in the two path model, and 121 undergraduate students were recruited to examine how implicit legitimacy moderate the emotion path. Second, I focused on the online collective action,107 students were recruited to examine how explicit legitimacy moderate the emotion path in the two path model, and 105 students were recruited to examine how implicit legitimacy moderate the emotion path. Results show that all hypotheses in offline collective action and the hypothesis that implicit legitimacy moderate the emotion path in online collective action are supported. However, in online collective action explicit legitimacy of authorities can not moderate the relationship between group relative deprivation and collective action intention. The conclusion also proves that the explicit and implicit legitimacy are relatively independent from each other again.Study 3 try to do the initial exploration of management strategies of legitimacy of the authorities in societies, because of its effect in collective action and the relationship between implicit and explicit legitimacy of authorities. First,260 undergraduate students and 241 adults participated in two laboratory experiments used a 3×2×2 between-subjects design. Secondly, in order to improve the external validity of the study,370 undergraduate students participated after they were filtered to higher/lower class based on their family occupations and subjective SES. The results of the three experiments showed that:lower-class participants perceived authorities more legitimate when they assigned to fair outcome condition relative to other unfair outcome conditions in both voice and no-voice procedure conditions, and they perceived lower legitimacy when they assigned to voice (vs. no-voice) procedure condition in both fair and unfair outcome that the partner received a worse reward conditions; upper-class participants perceived authorities more legitimate when they assigned to fair outcome condition relative to other unfair outcome conditions in voice procedure conditions, and they perceived more legitimate when they assigned to voice (vs. no-voice) procedure condition in fair outcome conditions.In summary, this dissertation extends research on legitimacy of authorities into a social domain based on applied psychology. After implicit and explicit legitimacy of authorities can be measured, I examined the effect of legitimacy in the two path-way model of offline and online collective action. Then three experiments were done to find the management strategies of legitimacy of authorities in societies. Finally, the conclusions of this dissertation are discussed, which is based on the theory and research of the legitimacy, the implicit social cognition theory, the dynamic dual path-way model and the social cognition theory of social class.