The Impact Of Fraud News On Prosocial Tendency

We read news every day and the mass media reports lots of negative news.Although news with negative content influence our decisions greatly,there are not so many studies focus on how negative news would influence individuals’ behaviors,especially the impact of fraud news on prosocial behaviors.The current study aims at investigating whether fraud news would reduce prosocial tendency,and the proprieties of the impact.To investigate these questions,we performed five experiments.In Experiment 1,participants read news on mild monetary fraud and then played dictator games.The allocated money toward the other player would be used to measure participants’ prosocial tendency toward others.Results showed that fraud news did not influence participants’ decisions in the dictator game.In Experiment 2 to Experiment 5,we used news on charity fraud and investigated how fraud news would influence individuals’ prosocial tendencies in different contexts.In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3,we found that fraud news reduced participants’ prosocial tendency.Fraud news reduced individuals’ donating and volunteering tendencies toward fraudulent charity,reduced their donating and volunteering tendencies toward self-selected charity,reduced their tendencies of helping others in public transport and the allocated money in the dictator game.Besides,the damage degree caused by fraud news on prosocial tendency differs in different contexts.The harm on prosocial tendency is most severe in the case closed to the situation described in the news and less severe in the case that was not so related to the situation in the news.Results of Experiment 4 and Experiment 5 showed that the presenting orders of fraud news have impact on prosocial tendency.Presenting fraud news before honest news increased individuals’ prosocial tendencies in the honest charity case to a certain extent.The study mainly found that the potential impact of different types of news on individuals’ prosocial tendency,the proprieties of the impact and the influential factors.The findings help us understand the impact of fraud news on prosocial tendency.