The Relationship Between The Stability Of Power And Prosocial Behavior

Researches of how power influence prosocial behaviors mainly focus on the differences of prosocial behaviors between high power individuals and low power individuals,and how power motivation influence prosocial behaviors,etc.However,the interaction between the stability of power and prosocial behaviors is not well studied.Considering that in an unstable powerful state is a common thing in real life and that there have been some research suggests that the stability of power may affect prosocial behaviors,this study will explore the relationship between the stability of power and prosocial behaviors.In Study 1,the possible relationship between the stability of power and prosocial behaviors was investigated from a third party perspective.The participants first read a story of two similar characters with different stability of power and then they were asked to predicate how much will the two characters donate for a stray animal foundation.The results showed that the participants thought the unstable powerful character would give less money to the foundation than the stable powerful character.In Study 2,the participants were themselves in a stable powerful state or in an unstable powerful state.Then they were asked to select some calculations for their competitors and non-competitors.The participants were told that the calculations were used as a transition thing and would not influence the final scores as well as the money they got.The results showed that compared to stable powerful participants,the unstable powerful participants choose more difficult calculations for their competitors and noncompetitors.Study 3 included two sub-studies.The data of Study 3a came from Study2.In Study 2,the participants could not only choose calculations for their competitors and noncompetitors,but also could play noise interference when their competitors were doing the test,which could affect the test scores to some extent.The results of Study 3a showed that there was no significant difference in the duration of noise played by the stable powerful participants and unstable powerful participants.To understand the different results of Study 2 and Study 3a,we did Study 3b to explore the relationship between the stability of power and the two types of prosocial behavior systematically.The first type of prosocial behaviors were prosocial behaviors that would hurt the interests of the participants(the same as Study 3a)and the second type of prosocial behaviors were prosocial behaviors that would not hurt the interests of the participants(the same as Study 2).The results of Study 3b showed that there was no significant difference between stable powerful participants and unstable powerful participants if doing prosocial behaviors would hurt their own interests.When doing prosocial behaviors had nothing to do with their own interests,however,the unstable powerful participants showed less prosocial behaviors than the stable powerful ones.