The Impact Of Outcome Expectation On Prosocial Decision Making

Outcome expectation refers to people’s expectation of the result of accomplishing a certain behavior.Prosocial decision making is the decision making processing which involves voluntary behavior intended to benefit another.As an important stage during decision making,the outcome expectation plays an important role in the prosocial decision making.This study was aimed at exploring the influence of factors such as outcome’s type,outcome’s valence,probability and magnitude of outcomes on prosocial decision making by using a modified decision making task.The present research consisted of two studies.Study 1(experiment 1)aimed to examine the effects of outcome’s type and valence on prosocial decision making by using a 2 × 2 withinsubjects experimental design.The independent variables were the types of outcome(mental vs.material)and the valences of outcome(positive vs.negative).The dependent variable was the willingness for help.On the basis of study 1,study 2 aimed to investigate the influence of outcome’s magnitude and probability on prosocial decision making.Study 2 consisted of four experiments: Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 respectively investigate the effect of the outcome’s valence and probability on prosocial decision making in the case of material outcomes(eg.monetary reward or lost)and spiritual outcomes(eg.praise or blame);Experiment 4 and Experiment 5 respectively investigated the effect of the outcome’s valence and magnitude on prosocial decision making in condition of material outcomes and spiritual outcomes.The experimental results showed that:(1)Both in the conditions of material and mental outcomes,the willingness for helping under the expectation of positive outcomes was significantly higher than that of negative outcomes;(2)Both in the conditions of material and mental outcomes,as the increase of the probability of negative outcome,the degree of willingness for helping was reduced.Conversely,as the increase of the probability of positive results,the degree of willingness of the participants was significantly enhanced.(3)With the expectation of monetary loss,the degree of willingness for helping was reduced gradually as the increase of the magnitude of negative outcome.Moreover,the differences between small,medium and large magnitudes were significant.Under the condition of positive outcome,the willingness for helping of medium and large magnitudes were significantly higher than that of small magnitude condition.However,the differences between the willingness for helping under medium and large magnitude conditions was not significant.(4)With the outcome expectation of receiving blame,the willingness for helping of large magnitude was significantly smaller than those of medium and small magnitude conditions.However,there was no significant difference between the conditions of medium and small magnitudes.With the outcome expectation of receiving praise,the willingness for helping under the conditions of medium and large magnitudes were both significantly higher than that of small magnitude.But there was no significant difference between the conditions of medium and large magnitude.The above results reveal the significant influence of the expected outcome type,valence,probability and magnitude on prosocial decision making,which is a good supplement to the research on prosocial decision making and social decision-making.