Subjects: Other Disciplines >> Synthetic discipline submitted time 2023-10-09 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Unethical behavior in the workplace poses significant harm to organizations, thus necessitating the exploration of intervention strategies in the context of management practices. While previous research has focused predominantly on intervention methods for unethical workplace behavior from a rational ethical decision-making standpoint, exploration of such methods from an intuitive ethical decision-making perspective has been limited. This project asserts that mindfulness has the potential to impact both the rational ethical decision-making system and the intuitive ethical decision-making system, consequently mitigating workplace unethical behavior.In relation to the rational ethical decision-making system, this study proposes to identify moral imagination and moral disengagement as two crucial mechanisms linking mindfulness to unethical behavior. Moral imagination has long been recognized as a significant factor in reducing unethical behavior. Mindfulness has the potential to enhance awareness, perspective-taking, and creativity, which are key dimensions of moral imagination. As a result, mindfulness can facilitate the cultivation of moral imagination, thereby contributing to a reduction in unethical behavior. Furthermore, moral disengagement represents a risk factor that can contribute to unethical behavior. Mindfulness, by fostering heightened self-monitoring among individuals, has the capacity to diminish moral disengagement. Therefore, moral disengagement acts as a mediator in the negative relationship between mindfulness and unethical behavior.Regarding the intuitive ethical decision-making system, this study proposes to identify emotional exhaustion and moral emotion as two significant mechanisms that link mindfulness to unethical behavior. Individuals experiencing emotional exhaustion are more susceptible to impulsive engagement in unethical behavior due to depleted self-control resources. Mindfulness has been shown to be advantageous in replenishing these self-control resources, thereby reducing emotional exhaustion. Consequently, emotional exhaustion acts as a mediator in the negative relationship between mindfulness and unethical behavior. Furthermore, moral emotions play a crucial role in encouraging individuals to avoid unethical behavior instinctively. Mindfulness, with its emphasis on cultivating a compassionate attitude, has the potential to foster virtuous qualities and enhance moral emotions. Consequently, moral emotion serves as a mediator in the negative relationship between mindfulness and unethical behavior.By integrating the rational and the intuitive ethical decision-making systems, a dual-system model of the relationship between mindfulness and unethical behavior is developed. Nevertheless, this project also proposes certain boundary conditions that influence this dual-system model. In terms of contextual factors, ethical climate is posited as a significant boundary condition. Ethical climate can help individuals with high levels of mindfulness recognize moral dilemmas, thereby enhancing the impacts of mindfulness on moral disengagement and moral emotion. Regarding individual factors, this project identifies moral identity and moral attentiveness as two important boundary conditions. Moral identity can strengthen the relationship between mindfulness and moral imagination, as individuals with a strong moral identity are more likely to engage in imaginative moral reasoning. On the other hand, moral attentiveness may negatively moderate the relationship between mindfulness and emotional exhaustion. This possibility suggests that among individuals with high levels of moral attentiveness, the relationship between mindfulness and emotional exhaustion may be weaker.This project endeavors to examine the influence of mindfulness on unethical behavior from the perspective of the dual-system theory of ethical decision-making, thereby contributing to the interdisciplinary exploration of mindfulness and behavioral ethics. By proposing a comprehensive theory of the relationship between mindfulness and unethical behavior, this study offers valuable insights for future research in related domains. Additionally, this project identifies several potential boundary conditions that may impact the relationships between mindfulness and its outcomes. While the effectiveness of mindfulness may vary across individuals, research exploring the boundary conditions that moderate the effects of mindfulness remains scarce. Thus, by investigating these possible boundary conditions, this project seeks to enhance our understanding of mindfulness in a comprehensive manner.In terms of practical implications, this project identifies mindfulness as a significant factor that influences both the rational and the intuitive ethical decision-making systems, thereby offering valuable insights for intervening in unethical behavior in the context of management practices. Previous intervention methods targeting unethical behavior in organizations have focused predominantly on the rational ethical decision-making system. However, it is crucial to recognize that many instances of unethical behavior occur impulsively rather than as a result of deliberate planning. Mindfulness, with its capacity to enhance both the rational and the intuitive ethical decision-making systems, emerges as an ideal approach to both impulsive and deliberate workplace unethical behaviors. By cultivating mindfulness among employees, organizations can create an environment that promotes ethical decision-making and mitigates the occurrence of unethical behaviors. This fact suggests that incorporating mindfulness-based interventions into management practices can effectively decrease unethical behaviors in the workplace. Key words
Subjects: Other Disciplines >> Synthetic discipline submitted time 2023-10-09 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Social influence refers to the process by which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are directly or indirectly influenced by others. Adolescents' social behavior is easily influenced by peers. However, most of the previous studies on peer effects have focused on the negative aspect of peer influence, such as peer influence on adolescent aggressive behavior, antisocial behavior, and risk-taking behavior, whereas the positive effects of peers have received relatively less attention. Existing work has not reached consensus on whether adolescents' prosocial behavior is more likely to be influenced by altruistic peers or egoistic peers, and the underlying mechanism is also unclear. The present study focuses on the positive effects of peers. Furthermore, the impact of different information providers is also an issue examined in this study. Given that children in Chinese culture are more subordinate to authority, Chinese adolescents may be more influenced by adults than peers. The belief in a just world may also play a moderating role in the peer influence, which would be explored in this study. The present study used the adaptive behavioral experimental paradigm and the conflicting source paradigm in developmental research on selective trust to investigate the effects of social information (prosocial, selfish, conflict) provided by peers or adults on adolescents' donation behavior at real cost, and the role of the belief in a just world in it. The sample included 77 adolescents aged 12-15 years (Mage = 14.06 ± 0.74 years, 32 girls). The specific setting of the adaptive paradigm was as follows: under the condition of prosocial influence, the decision of the peer observed by the participants was always more altruistic than their initial decision; similarly, under the condition of selfish influence, the decision of the peer was more selfish than their initial decision. In other words, the amount of donation that participants observed was determined by their initial donation. The results showed that the secondary donation after viewing the peer's decision was more altruistic than the initial donation in both the prosocial and the conflict conditions, while the difference between the two rounds of donation was not significant in the selfish condition, which indicates that the prosocial behavior of adolescents was more susceptible to prosocial influence. In addition, compared with the conflict condition and the selfish condition, the second donation of the participants in the prosocial information condition changed the most, which again confirmed the reliability and stability of the results. Moreover, adolescents were more likely to be influenced by information provided by peers than that provided by adults: adolescents changed their donation amount more in the peer influence condition than in the adult influence condition. We further focused on the performance of participants in the conflict condition: when adolescents observed both prosocial information and selfish information, their secondary donations were more likely to change in the direction of altruism, and this transition was more likely to occur in the peer influence condition, which indicates that adolescents are more likely to be influenced by peer role models than by adult role models. The belief in a just world moderated the prosocial influence of adolescents: individuals with high belief in the just world were more likely to be affected by positive social influence. The results indicate that adolescents are more likely to be positively influenced by peers. This study expands the theory of social learning theory, reveals the benefit of peer moral models on adolescents' prosocial behavior, and provides reference for improving the educational practice of adolescents' prosocial behavior.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： During mobile internet era and the age of big data, how to promote the revolution of household energy conservation through tailored information is one of the advanced researches. Based on grounded theory techniques, this study plans to use long-term observation, in-depth interviews, case studies and single-subject design technology to explore the short-run and long-run effects of tailored information on energy conservation psychology and decision-making process. In other words, the mode and mechanism for the influence of tailored information on household energy conservation behavior can be explored. In order to achieve the above objectives, a series of studies which integrates the cross-sectional design and longitudinal design will be implemented. That is, 18 months-long panel experiments consisted of 6 groups will be conducted based on cross-sequential design experimental ideas. In the process of data analysis, the differences among conservation psychology and decision-making of separated stages will be analyzed through analysis of variance (ANOVA), trend curve differences (dynamic differences) of energy conservation and decision-making process among different experimental groups will be tested by hierarchical linear model (HLM). And HLM will also be used to analyze the marginal effects of specific tailored information frame on energy conservation decision-making process. Furthermore, the overall blue print, implementation path and combination strategies of tailored information will be designed and tested accordingly. This study will develop tailored intervention theories on household energy conservation and open the “black box” of how tailored information impacts household energy conservation decision-making process by providing theoretical supports and empirical evidences.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： To own an object means that the owner has many informative rights to the object, such as touching, using, changing, tracking and transferring. Research revealed that 3-year-old children understand that an owner have exclusive rights to touch and use his/her own objects but others do not, but their understandings of owners’ rights to change, track and transfer property are relatively poorer. This indicates that the development of children’s representation of ownership rights may not be synchronous. Three-year- olds understand that an owner has right to entitle others to use his/her property, and actively maintain this. When someone prevents the enforcement of this right, they will protest. This demonstrates that young children are aware of second-order ownership rights. In future studies, the mechanisms underlying the dissociation among representations of different ownership rights should be explored. Besides, it is worthwhile investigating how children represent ownership rights of public property (such as buses). Different cultures may put different weight on specific ownership right, which calls for more cross-cultural studies.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Puberty is a unique period during which individuals experience rapid growth in social, emotional and cognitive aspects, yet remain immature. Compared with adults, adolescents are more inclined to engage in risky or reckless behaviors that are detrimental to their physical and mental health, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and dangerous driving. At the same time, from childhood to adolescence, the influence of parents on adolescents gradually weakens, while the influence of peers gradually increases. Regarding the question of how adolescents’ adventurous behavior is affected by their peers, the results of previous empirical studies are mixed. In addition, the mechanism of this influence, which is a more crucial research question, remains unknown. From the perspectives of personal characteristics and social interaction, this paper reviews the results of previous studies and finds facilitating effect of peers on adolescents' risk-taking behaviors. Specifically, when adolescents complete a risk-taking task, being watched by a peer can increase the adolescent's risk-taking behavior, even when the peers and the participants are not at the same place. When the adolescent and the peer are in the same room, and the peer can communicate with them or even give advice during the task, peers can play an even stronger role in facilitating the adolescent's risk-taking behavior. Compared with the influence from adults, adolescents are particularly sensitive to the influence from their peers. In addition, personal traits (such as resistance to peer influence and gender) and situational factors (such as the certainty of situation: vague/explicit, and different forms of peer participation: cooperation/competition) play a moderate role. The influence of peers on adolescents' risk-taking behavior and its underlying mechanisms can be explained from multiple aspects, including psychology, neurology, gene, society and culture. From the psychological aspect, this influence stems from the needs of adolescents to seek peers’ recognition and belonging, as well as learn from peers (i.e., social learning). From the aspect of neural mechanism, this influence comes from the interaction between cognitive control network and stimulus processing system: when adolescents make decisions involving risks in the presence of a real or virtual companion, activation of the cognitive control network decreases, and that of the reward system increases. From the genetic perspective, the effect may be due to susceptibility of specific genes. For instance, 5-HTTLPR short allele carriers are more sensitive to peer influence. From the social and cultural aspect, while the influence of peers on risk-taking behavior has a certain generality, the degree of the influence differs in different cultural contexts. For example, compared with white adolescents, risk-taking behaviors of non-white adolescents are more likely to be influenced by peers. In collectivist culture, adolescents’ smoking behavior is more positively correlated with that of their peers. Future research should further explore the influence of peers on adolescents' risk-taking behavior from the perspectives of development, cultural psychology and construction of complex model network.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Workplace safety is a crucial issue in high-risk industries around the world. Statistics show that with the improvement of engineering and technical reliability, more than two-thirds of accidents are at least partly caused by human factors. Unsafe behavior is the trigger of system failure, and the latent situational factors are the “resident pathogens”. Therefore, improving the situational factors is one of the effective ways to promote safety performance. Safety climate, which is defined as the employee shared perceptions with regard to safety policies, procedures, and practices in the organization, is well-documented as a robust predictor of safety behavior and safety outcomes. The effect size of safety climate on safety performance (e.g., safety behavior, accidents, and injuries) exceeds that of all other identified safety risk indicators. Nevertheless, its intervention study is relatively limited. Focusing on the core dimension of safety climate: management commitment to safety, we propose that direct safety management actions are an important way to reflect supervisors’/managers’ commitment to safety. Based on this, the current research has three aims: (1) examining the impact of supervisors’ and managers’ critical safety management actions on the group and organizational safety climate, respectively; (2) examining the impact of the supervisor-targeted intervention on group safety climate promotion by improving supervisors’ direct safety management action; (3) examining the impact of the manager-targeted intervention on organizational and group safety climate promotion by improving managers’ direct safety management action. We designed three studies to explore the questions above mentioned. Study 1 is a time-lagged survey to explore the impact of supervisors’ and managers’ critical direct safety management actions on group safety climate and organizational safety climate, respectively. As for supervisors, we supposed there are two critical direct safety management actions to influence their employees’ safety climate perception: supporting and guidance, involving workers. As for managers, the critical direct safety management actions could be managerial participation and communication. Additionally, given the importance of supervisors in cultivating group safety climate, at the group level, we developed a quasi-experiment study (Study 2) to enhance the group safety climate by improving the critical direct safety management actions of the supervisors. Furthermore, a quasi-experiment (Study 3) was designed to promote both group and organizational safety climate by improving critical direct safety management actions of the managers. We plan to adopt an intervention technique named Safety Management By Walking Around (SMBWA), which was found to be positively associated with the patient safety climate in the healthcare industry. The contributions of the current research are as follows. First, signaling theory is introduced into the theoretical framework of safety climate formation. It’s proposed that the managerial staff’s direct safety management action is a highly observable signal, which can convey their commitment to safety. As an important information source of employees’ perception of safety climate, managerial staff’s direct safety management action could be an effective strategy for safety climate promotion. The application of signaling theory can provide theoretical support for the research on the formation and change of safety climate. Second, we adopt a multi-level perspective to simultaneously explore the effect of the critical direct safety management actions of both supervisors and managers on the corresponding level of safety climate, highlighting the role of supervisors’ and managers’ critical direct safety management actions in enhancing the group and organizational safety climate. In addition, the current research sheds light on the impact of the manager-targeted safety climate intervention strategy on safety climate improvement at both group and organizational levels. The research results are expected to be applied in safety management practice.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Reading and theory of mind (ToM) both play important roles in the development of children. A large number of previous studies reveal that reading and ToM may have two-way promotion effects. On the one hand, shared reading with parents or teachers enables children to initiate joint attention. In this process, children and storytellers use a lot of terms of mental state to communicate with each other, and they can also construct an alternative social situation through social imagination and perspective-taking ability. In daily life, children will also understand stories by guessing and inferring the thoughts, intentions, desires and emotions of the characters through simulating real social activity, which promotes the development of children’s ToM. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown that ToM can also promote the development of children's reading ability in a lot of aspects. For example, in the process of reading, ToM can help children to improve their abilities to establish a macro view of reading, use metacognitive reading strategies, construct story situation models, and even promote their micro ability to understand specific phrases, sentences, discourses and multi-text materials. What's more, ToM may increase the reader's ability to express and monitor the characters' thoughts and emotions during the reading process. When readers can understand and express the mental states and emotions of the characters in the story, it indicates that they may have made some inferences and judgments about the mental states which are unclearly stated in the story. In this case, readers can understand the story more easily and are more likely to find the fun of reading, which may trigger more reading behaviors, thus leading to more frequent use of ToM and promote its development. Both reading and ToM show a good trend of mutual promotion and common development. In addition to behavioral research, further neurophysiological evidence shows that there is some overlap between the neural activity of reading and ToM. In the reading process, the default network shows strong activation. As the main support network for social cognition, default network also plays an important role in the development of ToM. In addition, the mirror nervous system contributes to the interaction between reading and ToM as well. The mirror nervous system enables individuals to understand or experience the actions, thoughts, intentions, and feelings of others. In addition, reading literary works, especially literary novels, can improve the individual's ToM by enhancing the mirror nervous system. Both behavioral and brain mechanism studies support that there may be a potential two-way promoting relationship between reading and ToM. In the future, it is necessary to pay more attention to the potential relationship between ToM and reading. Further in-depth and long-term longitudinal follow-up studies are needed to provide abundant empirical evidence for the relationship between reading and ToM. In addition, more attention should be paid to the development of ToM in school education and its positive influence on children's self-protection and compliance with moral norms. In line with the development of science and technology, it is also necessary to pay more attention to the influence of multimedia reading on children's ToM. Besides, in daily home reading or school teaching, parents and teachers should make efforts to increase intervention training to improve children's ToM and reading comprehension ability. For example, feedback training in reading is beneficial to promote children's perspective-taking and ToM, which includes emboldening children to talk deeply about their mental states and desires, asking children more questions, and encouraging children to play pretend games. All of these interventions may, to varying degrees, promote children to think about different views and mental states in various ways during reading process.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Mainstream theorists in risky decision-making have developed various expectation-maximization-based theories with the ambitious goal of capturing everyone’s choices. However, ample evidence has revealed that these theories could not capture every individual’s (“every one’s”) actual risky choice as descriptive theories. Substantial research has demonstrated that people do not follow the logical process suggested by expectation-maximization-based theories when making risky choices but rather rely on simplifying heuristics. From our perspective, the possible reason why mainstream decision theorists did not abandon the framework of expectation is that these theorists never doubted the validity of the expectation rule as a descriptive rule in describing decision-making under risk. We believe that expectation-maximization-based theories may capture risky choices when individuals make decisions for everyone. However, whether these theories could capture risky choices when individuals make decisions for themselves cannot be taken for granted. We thus used an eye-tracking technique to explore whether a theory for everyone would work well for every one. A total of 52 college students participated in the experiment. Three risky choice tasks were conducted in the present study: a D-everyone task, a D-multiple task, and a D-single task. In the D-everyone task, participants were asked to choose the more optimal option out of two options under the assumption that their selection would be the final decision for everyone who was facing the same choice—that is, everyone would be subject to the same choice but could receive different outcomes. In the D-multiple task, participants were asked to choose between the two options under the assumption that their selection would be applied a total of 100 times. In the D-single task, participants were asked to choose between the two options under the assumption that their selection would be applied only once to themselves. The participants’ eye movements were recorded while they performed the tasks. Behavioral results revealed that, compared with the D-single task, participants selected more choices correctly predicted by EV and EU theories, and took a longer time to make a decision in the D-everyone and D-multiple tasks. Furthermore, eye movement measurements revealed the following. (1) The scanpath patterns of the D-everyone task and D-multiple task were similar but different from those of the D-single task. (2) The depth of information acquisition and the level of complexity of information processing in the D-everyone task and D-multiple task was higher than that in the D-single task. (3) The direction of information search in the D-everyone task and D-multiple task was more alternative-based than that in the D-single task. (4) The eye-tracking measures mediated the relationship between the task and the EV-consistent choice. In summary, behavioral and eye movement results supported our hypotheses that participants were likely to follow an expectation strategy in the D-everyone and D-multiple tasks, whereas they were likely to follow a heuristic/non- expectation strategy in the D-single task. We found that expectation-maximization-based theories could capture the choice of an individual when making decisions for everyone and for self in a multiple-play condition but could not capture the choice of an individual when making decisions for self in a single-play condition. The evidence for the discrepancy between everyone and every one, which was first reported in our study, implied that the possible reason why expectation-maximization-based theories do not work is that a default compatibility between the full set (everyone) and the subset (every one) does not exist. Our findings contribute to an improved understanding of the boundaries of expectation-maximization-based theories and those of heuristic/non-expectation models. Our findings may also shed light on the general issue of the classification of risky decision-making theories.
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