Power Effects Individuals' Social Decision-Making-The Regulated Effect Of Social Value Orientation

People's decision-making is always influenced by factors of the environment, such as interpersonal relationship, the outcome of the decision-making. And one of the factor——power has been studied by foreign and local scholar. And the approach/avoid effect of power is come up to explain how power effect people decision-making. This study take this theory as the frame work, and considered social value orientation(SVO) as regulated variable, to study about the effect of SVO. The study help put the power approach/avoid theory in a deeper way.In this study, classic paradigms are used to manipulate participants' sense of power. Dictator game(DG) is used as a powerful situation, while ultimate game(UG) is a less powerful one. In experiment 1, participants' were asked to make decision in these two games and ERPs were used to detect the brain activity. Results showed that larger P2 was probed in powerful situation, indicating participants put more cognitive recourse in this situation. However, participants in less powerful situation felt more motive confliction as the N2 in less powerful situation was smaller than in powerful situation.Experiment 2 took SVO into account and the behavior experiment 2a showed a significant interact effect of power situation and SVO. In powerful situation, self-participants allocated more benefit to themselves than pro-social participants. While this difference disappeared in less powerful situation. The result also shows the regulated effect of SVO.In the basis of experiment 2a, experiment 2b compared the brain activity differences of different SVO participants in two types of powerful situation, using ERPs. Result showed a significant interact effect of powerful situation and SVO of N1 and P3. In powerful situation, prosocial participants' N1 were larger than self-participants, while the difference of P3 was not significant. In less powerful situation, prosocial participants' N1 were smaller than self-participants and prosocial participants' P3 were larger than self-participants. The result indicated that in different powerful situation the allocate of cognitive resource and evaluation of the decision-making are also affected by SVO. In experiment 2b the brain potential was also detected when participant receiving feedback, results showed that FRN in less powerful situation was larger than that in powerful situation, indicating that participants in less powerful situation have higher self-involvement.