The Impact Of Moral Judgments,social Distancing,and Unfairness On The Altruistic Behavior Of Third Parties

As one of prosocial behaviors,the third party altruistic behavior is a positive behavior to maintain social ethics,fairness and justice.Moral judgment plays an important role in prosocial behavior.However,most previous studies only focused on moral judgment and ignored the effect of social distance to some extent.Li et al.(2020)showed that social distance is related to third-party altruism.However,as far as the existing research results show,there is no research on the effect of moral judgment and social distance on third-party altruistic behavior.Therefore,on the basis of moral judgment,this study adds social distance and unfairness degree as independent variables and third-party altruism as dependent variables,so as to more comprehensively understand third-party altruism and reveal its causes and mechanisms.This not only helps to promote the in-depth development of moral judgment and behavior research,but also provides useful guidance for the maintenance of social ethics and fairness and justice.Based on previous research results,the dictator Game paradigm(DG)was adopted in this study to analyze the results of the third party’s punishing behavior and the third party’s compensating behavior at different levels,and to explore the effects of moral judgment,social distance and the degree of injustice on the third party’s altruistic behavior.In study 1,2(moral judgment level: high/low)×2(unfairness level: 90:10/60:40)was used as a mixed experimental design to explore the influence of different levels of moral judgment and unfairness on third-party altruistic behavior.The results show that,under the condition of high injustice,moral judgment significantly affects the altruistic behavior of the third party.Compared with the group with high moral judgment level,the punishment amount of the third party in the group with low moral judgment level is higher and the compensation amount of the third party is lower.In study 2,from the perspective of third party punishment,a three-factor mixed experimental design was adopted: 2(moral judgment level: high/low)×2(social distance:acquaintance/stranger)×2(unfairness degree: 90:10/60:40).The other-self integration scale was adopted and social distance was added to investigate the influence of social distance,moral judgment and unfairness degree on the third party punishment behavior.The results show that under the condition of high unfairness,when the distributor is an acquaintance,the penalty amount of moral judgment on the third party is significant.The penalty amount of the third party in the group with high moral judgment level is significantly higher than that in the group with low moral judgment level.In study 3,from the perspective of third-party compensation,a three-factor mixed experimental design of 2(moral judgment level: high/low)×2(social distance:acquaintance/stranger)×2(degree of unfairness: 90:10/60:40)was adopted to explore the effects of moral judgment,social distance and degree of unfairness on third-party compensation behavior.The results show that,under the condition of low injustice,in the group with high moral judgment level,social distance has a significant effect on the compensation of the third party,and the compensation amount of the third party is higher when the distributor is an acquaintance than when the recipient is an acquaintance.When the recipient is an acquaintance,moral judgment has a significant effect on the compensation of the third party.The compensation amount of the third party in the group with low moral judgment level is significantly higher than that in the group with high moral judgment level.Based on the above results,the following main conclusions are drawn:(1)Under highly unfair conditions,moral judgments significantly affect the altruistic behavior of third parties.(2)Under high unfair conditions,when the distributor is an acquaintance,the moral judgment significantly affects the third-party punishment behavior.(3)under low unfair conditions,social distance in groups with high moral judgment levels significantly affects third-party compensation behavior;When the recipient is an acquaintance,moral judgments significantly influence third-party compensation behavior.This study finds that under different unfair conditions,different levels of moral judgment have different results on the third-party altruistic behavior,and under different social distance conditions,the third party altruistic behavior will be affected.