异性互动情境中程序公平对合作行为的影响：有调节的中介模型

Cooperation is essential for survival and should not be ignored. When making decisions, whether to cooperate or not, people usually face conflict between maximizing personal interests at a social cost and maximizing collective interests at a personal cost. Within such context of social dilemmas, numerous studies have explored factors that facilitate cooperative behavior, and found that procedural fairness is the key antecedent to cooperation. However, the underlying mechanism of the procedural fairness – cooperative behavior link remains elusive. Moreover, past research mainly explored such link in the scenarios of same-sex interactions, leaving it unclear whether its link is consistent across genders. The current work aims to address these issues by exploring how procedural fairness affects cooperative behavior in opposite-sex person interaction scenarios, assessing the mediating role of cooperative expectations and the moderating role of others’ prior cooperative rates in this causal relation. A total of 152 undergraduates participated in this experiment. The opposite-sex person interaction scenarios were generated by introducing participants with an opposite-sex stranger and telling participants to play series games with the stranger. Procedural fairness was manipulated in an allocation task, in which determining an allocation by chance was relatively more fair than by willingness of person. Cooperation was subsequently studied by using the chicken game paradigm. Specifically, others’ prior cooperative rates were explicitly manipulated by informing participants the possibility that their interactive partner cooperated in previous experiments. In the condition of high cooperative rates, participants were informed that allocators who had participated this experiment before choosing to cooperate with 75% probability, whereas those in the condition of low cooperative rates were informed that previous allocators on average chose cooperate with 25% probability. Next, cooperative behavior was measured by calculating the number of cooperation options in the six rounds; afterwards, cooperative expectations were measured by asking participants to assess how many rounds their partner would choose cooperation/aggression. Results showed that experiencing fair procedures facilitated subsequent cooperation with the opponent, and that the effects were mediated by enhanced expectations of cooperation. Moreover, the positive prediction of procedural fairness on cooperative behavior was stronger in the condition of low cooperative rates than in high cooperative rates. Additionally, the mediating role of cooperative expectations in the associations between procedural fairness and cooperative behavior was significant in both conditions of high and low cooperative rates, and such mediating effect of others’ prior cooperative rates was larger in the condition of low (vs. high) cooperative rates. The present work revealed that the effect of procedural fairness on cooperative behavior is robust, because such effect in same-sex person interaction scenarios could also be found in the scenarios of opposite-sex interactions. Most importantly, the present work demonstrated that people use their experiences of procedural fairness as a cue to formulate cooperative expectations of others and that they subsequently use these expectations to decide on their own cooperation, which would be moderated by interaction partners’ prior cooperative information. In sum, the present work not only shed light on understanding the relation between procedural fairness and cooperative behavior, but also extended prior fair-related theories (e.g., Fairness Heuristic Theory) and the Goal Expectation Theory.