The Study Of The Influence Of Gratitude To Fair Behaior In Zhe Dictator Games

Gratitude is an important research field of the positive psychology, as a type of positive characters and excellent virtue; the fairness as a social norm and moral standard has already been widespread concerned of psychologists at home and abroad, in the blunderingly social environment. It is just in recent years that researches on fair behavior have been conducted from the perspective of emotion, which is also the frontier field of researcher on the fairness, that have got abundant research achievements. So the gratitude as a specific positive emotion also have influence on the fair behavior or not, and how the influence change when people got in to a fair or unfair situation, all these questions will be discussed in this research.This study was started from the concepts and theories of gratitude and fairness. The history and current situation of researches on gratitude and fair behavior were retrospected systematically, and the major research methods of these two fields were introduced in this article. Then the purpose and hypotheses were promoted correspondingly. This study included two experiments in a total, all the participants were university students, and chose the dictator game as the research paradigm to test the fair behavior. The experimental results are consistent with the hypothesis, confirmed our inference.The Experiment1induced different emotions, including gratitude (grateful group)、common feeling (neutral group)、happy (positive group)、disgust (negative group) through the event recalling method to test the different effects on the fair behavior. The results showed that the gratitude emotion dose affect the performance of its inequitable conduct. When Resource was allocated in the dictator game, compared to participants who feel common and disgusted, the grateful person will showed more fair behaviors, but the participants between grateful group and positive group will have no obviously differences on the fair behaviors.Experiment2used gratitude visit to induce grateful feeling, and made the fair or unfair situations by starting the corresponding cognition..We used a2(fair cognitive start, unfair cognitive start) X2(gratitude, common feeling) mixed design, and we discussed the influence of these2variables on the fair behavior. Experiment2results showed that the impact of gratitude on the fair behaviors of individuals still existed, no matter starting fair or unfair cognition before the dictator game. People who have gratitude emotion made more fair performances in the dictator game than the ones feeling commonly, in all of the cognitive starting conditions. Compared to the fair cognitive starting situation, the differences of fair behavior between gratitude group and common feeling group were much more obviously, when people got unfair cognitive start. In another words, The effect of gratitude to fair behavior will be much more powerful when the person get unfair cognitive start before the dictator game.