The Behavior Or The Heart?The Effect Of The Counterparts’ Beahvior And Emotion Expression On Cooperative Behavior

Cooperation is a decisive factor in determining the future development and prospects of mankind.However,cooperation means taking the risk of exploitation.Especially in the process of interacting with strangers,individuals lack information about their counterparts’ cooperativeness.Therefore,individuals may repeatedly experience and integrate the behaviors and emotion expressions of the counterparts and judge his/her cooperation in order to correct and guide their own behavior.Previous studies separately manipulated the interactive performance of the counterpart,however,in repeated games,both behavior and emotion expression exist simultaneously and may be inconsistent,which makes the decision-making situation more complicated.But the mechanism and boundary conditions of the interaction are not clear.Therefore,on the basis of previous studies,this study intends to explore the influence of the counterparts’ behavior and emotion expression on cooperative behaviors more systematically,as well as the role and mechanism of the counterparts’ group membership,in order to enrich the theoretical research on the effect of the counterparts’ characteristics on cooperative behavior.Pre-study generated 10 groups of emotional face pictures.Each group included neutral,joy,regret,and anger,and the most suitable group was selected as the emotional material for subsequent research.In study 1,both the counterparts’ behavior in each round of the game and their emotion expression of the game results were manipulated,and the cooperative expectations and cooperative behavior of the participants were measured.The influence of the counterparts’ behavior and emotion expression on cooperative behavior and the mediating effect of cooperative expectations were investigated.In Study 2,to further clarify the boundary conditions,group membership was manipulated by two methods: Minimal Group Paradigm(Study 2a)and natural group classification(Study 2b),to explore the moderating effect of group membership on the interaction of the counterparts’ behavior and emotion expression on cooperative behavior.The results showed that:(1)compared with those who implemented the extortion strategies,individuals showed a higher level of cooperation when interacting with those who implemented the generosity strategy;compared with competitive emotion expression,individuals showed a higher level of cooperation when interacting with the cooperative emotion expression(Study 1).(2)The effect of behavior was greater than that of emotion expression(Study 1).(3)There was an interaction effect of the counterparts’ behavior and emotion expression on cooperative behavior: compared with cooperative emotion expression(vs.competitive emotion expression),the counterparts’ behavior has a greater impact on cooperative behavior.On the other hand,the counterparts’ emotion expression has a greater impact on cooperative behavior with generosity rather than extortion(Study 1).(4)Cooperative expectations completely mediated the interaction of the counterparts’ behavior and emotion expression on cooperative behavior(Study 1).(5)Group membership moderated the interaction of the counterparts’ behavior and emotion expression on cooperative behavior: when interacting with the out-group members,the counterparts’ behavior had a greater influence on cooperative behavior than emotion expression;However,when interacting with the in-group members,the advantage of the effect of behavior was weakened(Study 2b)or even reversed(Study 2a).The above results show that the individual can constantly revise the cooperative expectations of the counterparts by repeatedly experiencing the counterparts’ behavior and the emotion expression that can convey the intentions,so as to guide his/her subsequent decision-making.Besides,individuals make cooperative decisions more dependent on behavioral information,but this phenomenon will weaken and even show the phenomenon of emotional expression reversal in intergroup interaction.This study enriched the theoretical research on the influence of characteristics of the counterparts on cooperative behavior and helped to clarify how individuals constantly integrate various kinds of information from their counterparts in the game process to make cooperative decisions in repeated games.