The Priming Effect Of Moral Model On Modern Colledge Students' Prosocial Behavior

It is important for the society and government to encourage people to learn and comply with the moral standards by setting up a good example of the socialist moral standard.Since the founding of new China,many moral models have emerged with their moral excellence and selfless dedication,and they have played an important role in motivating other people and guiding the society a good ethos of unity and mutual aid.However,with the social development into market economy,how the role of moral models maybe change has not come to a consistent conclusion in the current theoretical and empirical researches.In this study,we investigate the influence of moral models in modern society,and analyze the factors of moral model's influence with priming experiments.According to previous research results and theoretical arguments,we proposes the following hypotheses:Hypothesis 1: moral model priming can promote prosocial behavior.Hypothesis 2: psychological distance influence moral model's exemplary effect.Hypotheses 3: personality traits affect the exemplary effect of moral model.These three hypotheses are tested by the following three studies.Study 1: Through three experiments,we find that for the contemporary college students,the traditional moral model and the new moral model have a positive role in promoting their prosocial behavior.And there is a significant interaction between the moral model priming and the moral rule priming,that is to say,the moral model can promote the contemporary college students' prosocial behavior tendency under the influence of the moral rule.Study 2: The old and new “Lei Feng” have done similar model deeds but live in different times and different influence.With their story as priming materials,we use the psychological distance between them and college students as independent variables.The results show that the psychological distance has a significant impact on college students' prosocial behavior,and their exists significant correlation between psychological distance and prosocial behavior.The closer the psychological distancebetween the example,the more vulnerable to the impact of the priming effect of the moral model.Study 3: Analyzing the interaction between personality traits and role models,we find that there is no interaction between the individual's conformity tendency and the role model priming.Among the value orientation traits,the high cooperation subjects are more able to be promoted by the moral model.And the subjects with high collective interest will also have higher prosocial level,but the subjects of low collective interests can achieve the same level of prosocial behavior under the influence of the role model priming effect.This shows that the moral model can lead to the overall moral ethos of the whole society.Finally,this study also has some shortcomings.First,this research mainly about college students,which limits the extension of the research results.Different types of subjects,such as primary and middle school students,civil service groups,should also be studied to observe the relationship between the moral model and the audience.Second,in the measurement of the prosocial behavior,this study used subjective report to measure their prosocial behavior intention.Although this is a widely used method,it can not completely reflect people's behavior in the real situation.In the following studies,it is necessary to improve the measurements to make a better ecological validation.