The Effect Of Control Deprivation On Third-party Altruistic Punishment

Having a sense of control over one’s environment is a basic psychological need for human beings.However,the need is often not met due to various reasons.Compensatory control theory suggests that individuals with a loss of control will seek order to restore their sense of control.Researches from the consumer field have found that individuals with a loss of control prefer products with clear structures and practical products associated with problem-solving.Researches from the religious and political fields indicate that individuals with a loss of control are more likely to believe in the existence of God and support government management.However,previous researches mainly focus on individual-level order seeking,and it is not known whether a lack of control affects individuals’ pursuit of social-level order seeking.Fairness is one of the most important norms and orders that affect the positive development of society.Does a lack of control promote individuals’ punishment for unfair behaviors to obtain a sense of social order? This paper will explore this question as the starting point.This research uses the concept judgment task and dictator game with a third party to explore the impact of control deprivation on third-party altruistic punishment and further manipulate the duration of deprivation to examine the specificity of short-term and long-term deprivation on third-party altruistic punishment’s impact mechanism.Experiment 1 investigates the effect of control deprivation on third-party altruistic punishment,using a two-factor mixed experimental design.The betweensubject variable is the level of control(including control deprivation and control maintenance),and the within-subject variable is the degree of unfairness of the allocator in third-party altruistic punishment(including high and low levels of unfairness),and the dependent variable is the amount of punishment voluntarily taken out by the participant(the third party)in third-party altruistic punishment.The results show that,compared with control maintenance,control deprivation can increase third-party altruistic punishment under both low and high unfairness conditions.Experiment 2 examines the effect of the duration of control deprivation on third-party altruistic punishment,using a three-factor mixed experimental design.The between-subject variables are the level of control(including control deprivation and control maintenance)and duration(including short and long durations),and the withinsubject variable is the degree of unfairness(including high and low levels of unfairness)in third-party altruistic punishment and the dependent variable is the amount of punishment.Different from experiment 1,the duration is introduced.In addition,participants filled out a questionnaire measuring desire for control between concept judgment task and dictator game.The results show that the amount of punishment under the short-term control maintenance is significantly lower than that under the short-term control deprivation regardless of the condition of low unfairness or high unfairness.The amount of punishment under long-term control maintenance is significantly higher than that under long-term control deprivation.Desire for control may be the reason for the opposite trend in the amount of third-party punishment under short-term and long-term deprivation conditions(compared to the control maintenance).Experiment 3 investigates whether self-affirmation intervention can alleviate the negative effects of long-term control deprivation.A two-factor mixed experimental design is used,where the between-subject variable is whether self-affirmation intervention is provided after control deprivation(including self-affirmation intervention and non-self-affirmation intervention),and the within-subject variable is the degree of unfairness(including high and low levels of unfairness)in third-party altruistic punishment,and the dependent variable is the amount of punishment.The results show that under the condition of low unfairness,there is no significant difference in the amount of punishment between the condition of self-affirmation and non-selfaffirmation.Under the condition of high unfairness,the amount of punishment under the condition of self-affirmation is significantly more than that under the condition of non-self-affirmation.In conclusion,this research reveals the effect of control deprivation on thirdparty altruistic punishment.Firstly,control deprivation can promote social-level order maintenance behavior,manifested as higher third-party altruistic punishment.Secondly,the effect of control deprivation on third-party altruistic punishment is influenced by the duration of deprivation,where short-term control deprivation increases third-party altruistic punishment while long-term deprivation decreases it.Desire for control is a potential reason for the differential effects of short-term and long-term control deprivation on third-party altruistic punishment.Finally,self-affirmation intervention can alleviate the negative effect of long-term control deprivation.