Acute Social Stress Influences Moral Decision-Making Under Different Social Distances in Young Healthy Men.

Acute social stress has been shown to influence social decision-making. This study aimed to examine how social distance modulates the influence of acute social stress on young male moral decision-making. Sixty healthy male college students were randomly divided to be exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or a placebo version of the TSST (P-TSST) before they performed moral decision-making tasks. The results showed that participants under acute social stress showed obvious increases in subjective stress perception, negative affect, salivary cortisol, and alpha-amylase and made more altruistic choices for others compared to the control group. However, social distance regulates the promotion of this acute social stress, with the promotion effect being stronger in socially distant others. Furthermore, the interpersonal order difference of different social distances in altruistic decisions is smaller in low-conflict dilemmas than in high-conflict dilemmas. In addition, an increase in salivary cortisol was positively correlated with altruistic choices toward both acquaintances and strangers, whereas an increase in salivary alpha-amylase was only positively correlated with altruistic choices toward friends. The results suggest that social distance modulates the promotion of acute social stress on moral decision-making, which might stem from the divergent effects of cortisol and alpha-amylase.

Be a Rascal Among Rascal? The Vicarious Moral Self-Regulation Effect in College Students' Pro-Environmental Behaviors.

Purpose: According to social interaction theory, the psychology and behavior of individuals are influenced by others, especially these significant or intimate others. This classical social phenomenon, "Be a rascal among rascal", which explains the influence of others' behavior on an individual's behavior, has also been observed in pro-environmental behavior. In recent years, environmental psychologists have termed this interesting phenomenon as the "vicarious moral self-regulation effect", in which the prior environmental behavior of significant or intimate others influences an individual's subsequent environmental behavior. However, the stability and psychological mechanisms of the vicarious moral self-regulation effect are still not well understood. Therefore, this study aims to verify the vicarious moral self-regulation effect in pro-environmental behavior through four studies. Methods and Results: In Study 1, 90 participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups (a stronger green credentials manipulation, a weaker green credentials manipulation, or a control group about a close friend), and results showed that participants in both stronger and less green credential groups made fewer carbon-neutral choices than those in the control group in the carbon emissions task. In Study 2 (120 participants), compared to the control group, participants in the group imagining both environmentally friendly and unfriendly behavior of close friends made fewer carbon-neutral choices. This finding also was observed in Study 3 (93 participants), where participants under the group of free recalling both environmentally friendly and unfriendly behavior of close friends made fewer green purchasing choices. In Study 4 (75 participants), compared to the control group, participants in the group of both imagining and free recalling the environmentally friendly behavior of a close friend made fewer carbon-neutral choices, and participants in the group of both imagining and free recalling the environmentally unfriendly behavior of close friend made fewer green purchasing choices. Conclusion: Results suggest that the environmentally friendly behavior of a close friend induces the vicarious moral licensing effect (those who handle vermilion are not reddened), and the environmentally unfriendly behavior of a close friend induces the vicarious moral identity effect (those who touch ink are blackened). Environmental behaviors of intimate others induce the obvious fluctuating changes in college students' subsequent pro-environmental behaviors. This vicarious moral self-regulation effect can be explained by the mechanism of self-other overlap and provide scientific references for promoting pro-environmental behaviors among college students.

Are you more risk-seeking when helping others? Effects of situational urgency and peer presence on prosocial risky behavior.

Introduction: Prosocial risky behavior (PRB) proposes that individuals take risks for others' benefits or social welfare, and that this may involve trade-offs between risk and social preferences. However, little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms of risk-seeking or aversion during PRB. Methods: This study adopted the dilemma-priming paradigm to examine the interaction between the risk levels of personal cost and situational urgency on PRB (Experiment 1, N = 88), and it further uncovered the modulation of the risk levels of failure (Experiment 2, N = 65) and peer presence (Experiment 3, N = 80) when helping others. Results: In Experiment 1, the participants involved in risky dilemmas made more altruistic choices for strangers in urgent situations compared to those for strangers in non-urgent situations. However, increasing the risk levels of personal cost decreased the frequencies of help offered to strangers in urgent situations. Experiment 2 further established that, similar to the risk of personal cost, increasing the risk levels of failure when helping others also decreased the frequencies of help offered to strangers in urgent situations. Furthermore, in dilemmas involving a low-risk personal cost, Experiment 3 showed that peer presence encouraged the participants to make more altruistic choices when providing help to strangers in non-urgent situations. Discussion: Individuals demonstrate obvious risk-seeking behavior when helping others and that both non-urgent situations and peer presence weaken the effect of increased risk aversion on PRB in a limited manner.

Warmer Individuals Get More Help: The Influence of Stereotypes and Empathy on Moral Decision-Making.

The processing of moral decision-making is influenced by both cognitive and emotional systems, making it worth exploring exactly how each plays a role in the process of individual moral decision-making. In this study, 160 participants with either high or low empathy traits (80 each, as determined by the Interpersonal Response Index Inventory) completed a moral decision-making task regarding whether to help others (stereotyped as high warmth-high competence, high warmth-low competence, low warmth-high competence, low warmth-low competence) at the expense of themselves. The intent was to explore the influence of stereotypes and empathy traits on moral decision-making. The results showed that: (1) participants were more willing to help individuals with high warmth than those with high competence, showing a clear "primacy of warmth effect"; (2) this effect was weakened in participants with high empathy traits in comparison to those with low empathy traits, as their willingness to help individuals with low warmth was significantly higher than that of participants with low empathy traits. The results suggest that stereotypes about warmth and competence moderate altruistic tendencies in moral decision-making and that this moderation is more pronounced in individuals with low empathy traits than in those with high empathy traits.

Parental Attachment and Adolescent Moral Reaction Modes: The Serial Mediating Model of the Teacher-Student Relationship and Deviant Peer Affiliation.

Purpose: Moral decision outcomes and emotional experiences after moral decisions are combined to create four moral reaction modes: happy victimizer (HV), unhappy victimizer (UHV), happy moralist (HM), and unhappy moralist (UHM). This study aimed to explore the relationships between parental attachment (PA) and adolescent moral reaction modes, and further examine the mechanism of the serial mediating effects of the teacher-student relationship (TS) and deviant peer affiliation (DP). Sample and Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2022 among 3053 students (including 1496 females) from four middle schools, four high schools, and three colleges in China using a voluntary and anonymous questionnaire. Results: Our study reveals that PA was positively associated with HM modes and negatively associated with UHM, UHV, and HV modes. Both TS and DP serially or partly mediated the relationship between PA and adolescents' four moral reaction modes. Conclusion: This study uncovered significant social relationship pathways for moral reaction modes. TS and DP are two important mediators between PA and moral reaction modes. Secure parental attachment can develop positive teacher-student and peer relationships. This can then encourage adolescents to behave in more positive HM modes and fewer UHM/HV/UHV modes.

Neural correlations of the influence of self-relevance on moral decision-making involving a trade-off between harm and reward.

Although economists have suggested that humans generally prioritize maximizing their own self-interest rather than others' when distributing rewards, recent psychological studies have shown that people are hyperaltruistic when allocating physical harm to themselves and others during moral decision-making. However, little is known about how the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying self-relevance modulate this behavioral tendency under different degrees of physical harm. This study adopted a moral decision-making task to investigate behavioral and neural processes during moral decision-making involving different levels of self-relevance and physical harm. Event-related potentials were measured while participants made trade-offs of different monetary gains for themselves against painful electric shocks experienced by the receivers (self, friend, or stranger). These results suggest that early anterior N1, indexing fast and automatic moral intuitional process, decreased during the strong conflict trade-off decisions involving strong painful electric shocks and much monetary gains. Lower self-relevance enhanced the aversive experience and increased the mental cost of resolving moral conflict, reflected by a larger P260-LPP (300-450 ms) effect during weaker conflict decisions toward strangers than themselves and friends. However, this effect was weaker during strong conflict decisions. When making decisions about whether to shock others to gain money for themselves, participants were hyperaltruistic, foregoing greater self-interest to restrain harm directed toward strangers than themselves or friends. These findings shed light on the neural basis of the tension between egoistic and altruistic tendencies during moral decision-making integrating benefits and harms.

Influence of Self-Relevance and Reputational Concerns on Altruistic Moral Decision Making.

Complex moral decision making may share certain cognitive mechanisms with economic decision making under risk situations. However, it is little known how people weigh gains and losses between self and others during moral decision making under risk situations. The current study adopted the dilemma scenario-priming paradigm to examine how self-relevance and reputational concerns influenced moral decision making. Participants were asked to decide whether they were willing to sacrifice their own interests to help the protagonist (friend, acquaintance, or stranger) under the dilemmas of reputational loss risk, while the helping choices, decision times and emotional responses were recorded. In Study 1, participants showed a differential altruistic tendency, indicating that participants took less time to make more helping choices and subsequently reported weaker unpleasant experience toward friends compared to acquaintances and strangers. In Study 2, participants still made these egoistically biased altruistic choices under the low reputational loss risk conditions. However, such an effect was weakened by the high reputational loss risks. Results suggested that moral principle guiding interpersonal moral decision making observed in our study is best described as an egoistically biased altruism, and that reputational concerns can play a key role in restraining selfish tendency.

The Effect of Preceding Self-Control on Prosocial Behaviors: The Moderating Role of Awe.

The exertion of self-control is known to result in subsequent detrimental effects on prosocial behaviors. Moreover, certain studies have demonstrated that positive emotions could drive people to allocate more attentional resources for conducting prosocial behaviors. However, whether and how awe - one important type of positive incidental emotion - moderates the effect of exerting self-control on subsequent prosocial behaviors remains unclear yet. The anonymous economic dictator game is an effective index of prosocial behaviors. We examined the influence of exerting self-control on prosocial behavior and the moderating role of awe on the effect of exerting self-control on prosocial behaviors in two experiments (N = 280). We adopted the incongruent Stroop task to induce the exertion of self-control and participants were required to allocate money to others in the anonymous dictator game (Experiment 1). We used the narrative recall task paradigm to elicit the emotion of awe during the interval between Stroop tasks and the dictator game (Experiment 2). Results indicated that the exertion of self-control was detrimental to prosocial behaviors and awe weakened the detrimental effects of exerting self-control on prosocial behavior. We interpreted these results in terms of the protective inhibition of self-regulation and motivation (PRISM) model.

The Effect of Negative Feedback on Positive Beliefs in Self-Deception.

In the present study, we applied the forward-looking paradigm to examine how positive beliefs appear in self-deception and to further reveal the influence of negative feedback on positive beliefs to decrease self-deception. In Experiment 1, the answer group (with answer hints provided below the test material) and the control group (without answer hints) completed two tests. Participants estimated their Test 1 scores, predicted their performance on the upcoming Test 2 without answer hints, and completed Test 2. Their actual scores on the two tests were recorded. The results showed that the answer group predicted higher Test 2 scores than the control group, but the two groups did not differ in their actual scores. These results showed that the answer group had positive self-deception. In Experiment 2, the two groups were given negative feedback (vs. no feedback) after Test 1, and the changes between their estimated scores on Test 1 and their predicted score and actual score on Test 2 were measured. The results indicated that there was no significant difference in the estimated scores and the predicted score between the two groups under the feedback condition compared with the negative feedback condition. These findings demonstrated that the effectiveness of the forward-looking paradigm can activate participants' positive beliefs and cheat behaviors by providing the answers to induce self-deception, and negative feedback can decrease the occurrence of self-deception by reducing the positive beliefs of individuals and improving self-awareness to prevent or eliminate the negative impact of self-deception.

The Influence of Self-Control and Social Status on Self-Deception.

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of self-control and social status on self-deception. The present study adopted a forward-looking paradigm to investigate how self-control and social status influence self-deception. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to complete 10 questions, after they predicted and completed 40 questions (commonsense judgment materials) either with or without answer hints. The results indicated that the participants had higher predicted scores under conditions with answer hints compared with conditions without answer hints and that the predicted scores were much higher than the actual scores under conditions with answer hints. In Experiment 2, individuals with different self-control traits were chosen to perform the operation and induction of the perception of social status and then complete tests such as Experiment 1. The results showed that differences in the predicted scores between conditions with answer hints and those without answer hints were observed to be greater in individuals with low self-control traits than in individuals with higher self-control traits, however, such differences between individuals with higher and low self-control traits were only observed in conditions with low social status perception, not in the conditions with high social status perception. The findings indicated that compared with individuals with high self-control, low self-control individuals tended to produce more self-deception. In addition, high social status in the individuals' perception could restrain the influence of low self-control on self-deception, while low social status in the individuals' perception could increase the self-control's influence on self-deception.

Sociality Mental Modes Modulate the Processing of Advice-Giving: An Event-Related Potentials Study.

People have different motivations to get along with others in different sociality mental modes (i.e., communal mode and market mode), which might affect social decision-making. The present study examined how these two types of sociality mental modes affect the processing of advice-giving using the event-related potentials (ERPs). After primed with the communal mode and market mode, participants were instructed to decide whether or not give an advice (profitable or damnous) to a stranger without any feedback. The behavioral results showed that participants preferred to give the profitable advice to the stranger more slowly compared with the damnous advice, but this difference was only observed in the market mode condition. The ERP results indicated that participants demonstrated more negative N1 amplitude for the damnous advice compared with the profitable advice, and larger P300 was elicited in the market mode relative to both the communal mode and the control group. More importantly, participants in the market mode demonstrated larger P300 for the profitable advice than the damnous advice, whereas this difference was not observed at the communal mode and the control group. These findings are consistent with the dual-process system during decision-making and suggest that market mode may lead to deliberate calculation for costs and benefits when giving the profitable advice to others.

Interpersonal relationship modulates the behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making.

Interpersonal relationship (IR) may play an important role in moral decision-making. However, it is little known about how IR influences neural and behavioral responses during moral decision-making. The present study utilized the dilemma scenario-priming paradigm to examine the time course of the different intimate IR (friend, acquaintance, or stranger) impacts on the emotional and cognitive processes during moral decision-making. Results showed that participants made less altruistic decisions with increased decision times and experienced more unpleasure for strangers versus friends and acquaintances. Moreover, at the early moral intuitional process, there was no significance difference observed at N1 under different intimate IR; however, at the emotional process, larger P260 which reflects the dilemma conflicts and negative emotional responses, was elicited when moral decision-making for strangers; at the later cognitive process, such difference was also observed at LPP (300-450 ms) which indexes the later top-down cognitive appraisal and reasoning processes. However, such differences were not observed between friends and acquaintances. Results indicate that IR modulates the emotional and cognitive processes during moral decision-making, suggesting that the closer the IR is, the weaker the dilemma conflicts and emotional responses are, and the more efficient this conflicts are solved.

Distraction Modulates Self-Referential Effects in the Processing of Monetary and Social Rewards.

A reward that is personally relevant tends to induce stronger pursuit motivation than a reward that is linked to other people. However, the role of attention in eliciting this "self-referential reward effect" remains unclear. In our two studies, we evaluated the significance of attention in self-referential reward processing utilizing an ownership paradigm, which required participants to complete a visual search task to win either monetary rewards (in Study 1) or social rewards (in Study 2) for themselves or for an acquaintance. Access to attentional resources was manipulated by sometimes including a distracting stimulus among the presented stimuli. The results of Study 1 revealed that a significant self-referential reward effect emerged under undistracted attentional conditions and was associated with improved task performance when self-owned monetary rewards were available. However, distracted attention impaired this self-referential reward effect. Moreover, distracted attention was also observed in the self-referential social reward processing in Study 2. These results suggested that distracted attention can impair the pursuit advantage for self-relevant rewards; self-referential processing is strongly dependent on attentional resources.

Consciously over Unconsciously Perceived Rewards Facilitate Self-face Processing: An ERP Study.

Consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards are thought to modulate essential cognitive processes in different ways. However, little is known about whether and how they modulate higher-order social cognitive processes. The present ERP study aimed to investigate the effect of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the temporal course of self-face processing. After a monetary reward (high or low) was presented either supraliminally or subliminally, participants gain this reward by rapidly and correctly judging whether the mouth shape of a probe face and a target face (self, friend, and stranger) were same. Results showed a significant three-way interaction between reward value, reward presentation type, and face type observed at the P3 component. For the supraliminal presentations, self-faces elicited larger P3 after high compared to low reward cues; however, friend-faces elicited smaller P3 and stranger-faces elicited equivalent P3 under this condition. For the subliminal presentations, self-faces still elicited larger P3 for high reward cues, whereas there were no significant P3 differences for friend-faces or stranger-faces. Together, these results suggest that consciously processed rewards have distinct advantages over unconsciously processed rewards in facilitating self-face processing by flexibly and effectively integrating reward value with self-relevance.

Negative Emotion Weakens the Degree of Self-Reference Effect: Evidence from ERPs.

We investigated the influence of negative emotion on the degree of self-reference effect using event-related potentials (ERPs). We presented emotional pictures and self-referential stimuli (stimuli that accelerate and improve processing and improve memory of information related to an individual's self-concept) in sequence. Participants judged the color of the target stimulus (self-referential stimuli). ERP results showed that the target stimuli elicited larger P2 amplitudes under neutral conditions than under negative emotional conditions. Under neutral conditions, N2 amplitudes for highly self-relevant names (target stimulus) were smaller than those for any other names. Under negative emotional conditions, highly and moderately self-referential stimuli activated smaller N2 amplitudes. P3 amplitudes activated by self-referential processing under negative emotional conditions were smaller than neutral conditions. In the left and central sites, highly self-relevant names activated larger P3 amplitudes than any other names. But in the central sites, moderately self-relevant names activated larger P3 amplitudes than non-self-relevant names. The findings indicate that negative emotional processing could weaken the degree of self-reference effect.

Reward Promotes Self-Face Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study.

The present study adopted a reward-priming paradigm to investigate whether and how monetary reward cues affected self-face processing. Event-related potentials were recorded during judgments of head orientation of target faces (self, friend, and stranger), with performance associated with a monetary reward. The results showed self-faces elicited larger N2 mean amplitudes than other-faces, and mean N2 amplitudes increased after monetary reward as compared with no reward cue. Moreover, an interaction effect between cue type and face type was observed for the P3 component, suggesting that both self-faces and friend-faces elicited larger P3 mean amplitudes than stranger-faces after no reward cue, with no significant difference between self-faces and friend-faces under this condition. However, self-faces elicited larger P3 mean amplitudes than friend-faces when monetary reward cues were provided. Interestingly, the enhancement of reward on friend-faces processing was observed at late positive potentials (LPP; 450-600 ms), suggesting that the LPP difference between friend-faces and stranger-faces was enhanced with monetary reward cues. Thus, we found that the enhancement effect of reward on self-relevant processing occurred at the later stages, but not at the early stage. These findings suggest that the activation of the reward expectations can enhance self-face processing, yielding a robust and sustained modulation over their overlapped brain areas where reward and self-relevant processing mechanisms may operate together.