The Effect Of Empathy And Social Relation On Pro-social Behavior Under The Social Exclusion

With the increasing number of social violence or tragic events happened,psychologists began to pay attention to the relationship between social exclusion and individual behavior.Pro-social behavior is an important factor to maintain good interpersonal relationship and influenced by personal and environmental factors.Empathy is an important factor to pro-social behavior.And empathy-altruism hypothesis believe that empathy is positively related to helping behavior.Another research shows that social exclusion could cause the pain affect and reduce empathy.So it need to be validated in social exclusion condition.Multimotive model argues that the excluded would like to establish a new relationship with the people who have exclusionary act.And the reactions are influenced by the interpretation on event and the importance of the social relationship.In summary,this study focus on the effects of pro-social behavior on the role of social relations in social exclusion scenarios.199 participants were assigned to six conditions: 2(empathy: high vs.Low)×3(social relation: the best friends\students vs.generally familiar friends\ classmates vs.new friends\classmates)with between-subjects design,and the dependent variable is the pro-social tendency.Cartoons have been used to recall the memory of the social exclusion.Interpersonal Reactivity Index-C scale was used to measure empathy,scales from Lau's and Chen's study were used to measure the relationship intimacy and importance,self—made questionnaire was used to measure the pro-social tendency.Main conclusions are as followed:(1)In this study,writing and memoring about the experience of social rejection is an effective way to induce the rejection of the subjects,and the score of rejection after initiation is significantly higher than that of the exclusion before initiation.(2)Under the situation of social exclusion,empathy and social relations have significant main effect on prosocial tendency to the people who have exclusionary act,but no significant interaction.(3)Under the situation of social exclusion,empathy and intimacy has a significant positive prediction function on prosocial behavior form participants to implement rejection,pro-social behavior are not significant predicted by the importance of relationshirp.