The Inflence Of Shae On Interpersonal Trust

Shame culture is an important part of Chinese traditional culture,but with the rapid development of market economy,the pursuit of personal financial interests makes Chinese traditional moral culture gradually abandoned by people.In society,in order to pursue personal interests and moral violations occur from time to time,the situation of shame weakening and lack is increasingly prominent.Moreover,with the spread of social immorality,social interpersonal relations become tense,and there is a trust landslide and trust crisis.In the long run,it will lead to the destruction of social stability and the recession of social economy.It is urgent to find an effective way to improve this situation.As an important moral emotion,shame has been widely concerned by scholars,and trust,as the lubricant of interpersonal relationship and economic development,has always been the research hotspot of scholars.However,there are few empirical studies on how shame affects interpersonal trust.Therefore,this study explores the impact of shame on trust behavior in the context of Chinese culture.In each experiment of this study,the story situation method was used to manipulate the shame emotion of the subjects,and the trust game was used to investigate their trust behavior.In Experiment 1,the influence of shame on trust behavior was explored,and the influence of shame on trust behavior was also explored in both endogenous and exogenous ways.Experiment 1 found that shame emotion had a significant effect on trust behavior,and the trust behavior of the exogenous shame group was significantly higher than that of the endogenous shame group and the control group.In order to explore the positive influence of shame on trust and the influence of shame in different situations on trust in a more comprehensive way,Experiment 2 improved Experiment 1 by categorizing shame into the emotions triggered by incompetence and moral anomie to explore whether shame in different situations can have a positive impact on trust.The results showed that the trust behavior of the moral anomie shame group was significantly higher than that of the incompetence shame group and the control group.In order to continue to investigate the impact of shame on trust and whether transferred shame and individual shame have the same positive impact on trust behavior in the context of Chinese culture,Experiment 3 used the shame story situation with the mother as the protagonist to induce the subjects’ transferred shame,and used the trust game to investigate the trust behavior,the results show that: the transferred moral anomie shame can also have a significant positive impact on the subjects’ trust behavior.In order to investigate the mechanism of the positive effect of shame on trust behavior,we propose the hypothesis that shame increases the trust behavior to others by increasing the needs for affiliation of the subjects.In Experiment 4,the needs for affiliation of the subjects were measured by the State Need to Affiliate Questionnaire.The results found that: the trust behavior of the shame group was significantly higher than that of the control group and the mediating effect of the needs for affiliation was not significant.In Experiment 5,in order to enhance the external validity of the experimental results and further expand the research on the impact of shame on trust,social distance variables were included in the study to investigate the interaction between shame and social distance on trust behavior.The results show that: under the condition of far social distance,the trust behavior of shame group is significantly higher than that of control group,and shame effectively reduces the difference of trust when facing different social distance objects.To sum up,these experimental results show that shame can have a positive impact on trust behavior,but this positive impact has certain conditions,when the individual’s shame is generated by moral anomie behavior,and the influence of shame on trust behavior is exogenous.The mechanism that shame has a positive effect on trust behavior is not the needs for affiliation.Shame and social distance interact with trust behavior,shame can effectively reduce people’s differential trust.