The Influence Of Power Sense On College Students’ Prosocial Behavior:A Chain Mediation Model

Prosocial behavior,as one of the indicators of positive social development of individuals,plays an important role in the harmonious development of society.The sense of power as the perception of owning and controlling resources has a determining role in the occurrence of Prosocial behavior.The social information processing model suggests that individuals first identify cues in their environment that others ask for help,subsequently perform flexible cognitive processing within the brain,and then finally implement Prosocial behaviors based on how well their resources match their environment.Currently,there are two main types of effects in the academic community regarding the influence of the sense of power on Prosocial behavior: facilitation and inhibition.The inhibition relation is derived from the effect that the nature of power is to control resources and thus increase interpersonal distance,while the facilitation relation is derived by combining situational as well as cognitive factors.Based on the social information processing model,this study explores the effect of sense of power on college students’ Prosocial behavior,and introduces two mediating variables,cognitive flexibility and psychological availability,to construct a chain mediation model and investigate the mechanism of the effect of sense of power on college students’ Prosocial behavior.This study contains two sub-studies: Study 1 examines the effect of sense of power on college students’ Prosocial behavior and explores the chain mediating role of cognitive flexibility and psychological accessibility.The results of Study 1,which was administered to 801 college students using a questionnaire,indicated that a sense of power positively influenced the Prosocial behavior of college students and the chain mediation model was valid.Study 2 examined the effect of manipulating the sense of power on Prosocial behavior and the underlying mechanisms.Study 2 adopted an experimental method to recruit 169 subjects to participate in the experiment,and used a one-way between-subjects experimental design with a contextual recall method to initiate subjects’ sense of power.The results showed that manipulating college students’ sense of power also positively predicted Prosocial behavior,and the chain mediation model held true.Combining the two studies led to the conclusion that(1)sense of power significantly and positively predicted prosocial behavior.(2)Cognitive flexibility mediates the relationship between sense of power and prosocial behavior.(3)Psychological availability mediates the relationship between power perception and prosocial behavior.(4)Cognitive flexibility and psychological availability play a chain mediating role in the relationship between power perception and prosocial behavior.