关键词: 助人决策, 人际敏感性, 决策角色, 社会压力, 助人行为动机

Abstract: Previous research has identified several factors that may affect individuals’ helping decisions, including personality traits, character traits and situational factors. In recent years, the most important and fascinating goal in psychology is to understand and explain human helping behavior. Some research found that individuals were driven to help others by egoism motivation so as to attract their attention and receive high praise. This motivation may be reflected by one important personality trait--interpersonal sensitivity, it refers to individuals’ levels of sensitivity to others’ opinion. However, the relationship between interpersonal sensitivity and helping decisions has not been studied yet. The purpose of this study is to examine the differences in helping decision-making among individuals with different interpersonal sensitivity. Meanwhile, two situational factors (decision maker’s role and social pressure) are introduced into the experiment to explore the impact of the interaction between personality trait (interpersonal sensitivity) and situational factors on helping decision-making. The present study included 2 experiments. The first experiment employed 2(interpersonal sensitivity: high/low) × 3(decision maker’s role: self/friend/stranger) mixed design with interpersonal sensitivity as a between-subjects variable. Participants were divided into two groups by interpersonal sensitivity scores, and asked to make helping decision about time for different roles. The second experiment employed 2(interpersonal sensitivity: high/low) × 3(decision maker’s role: self/friend/stranger) × 2(social pressure: high/low) mixed design with interpersonal sensitivity and social pressure as a between-subjects variable. Participants were divided into four groups by interpersonal sensitivity and social pressure scores, and asked to make helping decision about money for different roles. Based on two experiments, we found that: (1) Compared to low interpersonal sensitivity, participants with high interpersonal sensitivity were more likely to help others. (2) When individuals made help decisions for themselves, friends, and strangers, their willingness of helping decreased in turn, and the difference between the three of them was significant. (3) Under high social pressure condition, compared to individuals with low interpersonal sensitivity, individuals with high interpersonal sensitivity were more willing to help others, whereas the difference between two groups was not significant under low social pressure condition. (4) Compared to making decisions for their friends, individuals in high social pressure condition were willing to donate more money to others when making decisions for themselves, whereas the difference between the two roles was not significant under low social pressure condition, meanwhile, compared to making decisions for strangers, individuals with the other roles were willing to donate more money to others. (5) Under high social pressure conditions, compared to individuals with low interpersonal sensitivity, individuals with high interpersonal sensitivity were more willing to help others when making decisions for friends or strangers. These results suggested that the interactions between personality traits and situational factors affected individuals’ helping decision-making. Interpersonal sensitivity appeared to be an important personality trait which had important effect on helping decisions, and situational factors, such as decision maker’ role and social pressures played the moderate role in this effect. These findings also proved the interpersonal sensitivity could be a personality trait that was linked with some egoistic motivations of helping.

Key words: helping decision-making, interpersonal sensitivity, decision maker’ role, social pressure, motivation