Resarch On The Influence Of Social Interaction On Prosocial Behaviors And Prosocial Behaviors Spillover Effect

Prosocial behaviors are beneficial to others and bring positive benefits to society,which have become the focus of social concern.Environmental protection and social donation are two important aspects of prosocial behavior.Environmental protection can bring benefits to society,and social donation can bring benefits to others.With the rapid economic growth and rapid improvement of urbanization,waste pollution has threatened the sustainable development of social environment and the health of residents,which is undoubtedly a huge challenge for the government and the public.Faced with the increasing diversification of human needs and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor,our country has organized regular social donation activities.However,residents have the idea deviation to donation behavior,which leads to the low donation rate.Therefore,it is urgent to strengthen environmental protection and social donation behaviors,to reduce environmental risks and unfair resource distribution.Introducing social interaction(social norms and social networks)into the framework of social economics from a micro perspective,this paper examines the direct impact of social interaction on the prosocial behavior of environmental protection.The paper further studies the spillover effect of prosocial behavior,and extends the prosocial behavior of individual environmental protection to the prosocial behavior of donation between people.Combining theories of personal status and self-identity,social attitude and social trust,the paper explores whether there is a spillover effect and the path of influence between donation behaviors.Specifically,this paper adopts the methodology of ordered logit models to capture social interactions and explore their influences on the behaviors involving waste sorting,bringing own shopping bags and reusing plastic bags in other aspects.Using the data from the Chinese General Social Survey in 2013(CGSS,N=4113),the results reveal that social interactions(social norms and social networks)exert a significant positive influence on waste sorting while only social norms are positively associated with bringing own shopping bags.Meanwhile,there is no convincing evidence for the interaction effects between social norms and social networks on waste sorting,yet the interaction item does work together influencing bringing own bags and reusing bags behaviors and its coefficient is negative.Moreover,the results show that social norms have a much larger effect on waste-related behaviors in males than females,while social networks show significant impacts on waste sorting only for females.For people with higher education levels,the impacts of social norms and social networks on sorting waste and bringing own bags behaviors are insignificant,while the higher income groups are weakly affected by social networks as well.This may be due to time constraints and opportunity cost.This part provides new insight into waste management from the perspective of social interaction.Furthermore,based on the study of the direct impact of social interaction on prosocial behaviors,the paper explores whether the spillover effect could be produced after the prosocial behavior changes from individual behavior to donation behavior between people,and explores its possible mechanism.This paper uses the data of China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2014,2016 and 2018 to study whether the prosocial behavior of donations have spillover effects.We build a multiple mediation effect model to investigate the influence path of the spillover effect and adopt the method of Bootstrap to test.Endogeneity test and robustness test are performed.The research results show that there is a positive spillover effect between donation behaviors after prosocial behavior changes.In addition,this paper finds that the positive spillover effect of donation behavior has a significant effect through the four intermediary paths of personal status and self-identity,social attitude and social trust.They have a positive intermediary effect for the spillover effect.It provides a new way for residents’ donation behavior to spill into social donation and regional resource allocation in micro sense.Compared with the existing literature on prosocial behavior,the possible innovations of this paper are:(1)this paper explores the influencing factors of prosocial behavior based on the perspective of social interaction and examines whether the main demographic characteristics have a differential effect on its results.It brings a new perspective for the research of prosocial behavior influencing factors.(2)Based on the study of the influencing factors of individual prosocial behavior,this paper further focuses on the spillover effect of prosocial behavior between people,and expands the research scope of prosocial behavior.(3)This paper explores the existence and rationality of the spillover effects of prosocial behaviors by constructing a multiple mediating effect model through personal identity and self-identity,social attitudes and social trust,and conducts endogeneity test.To a certain extent,it relieves the endogenous problem of the model and makes the result more reliable.