There are some noteworthy practical implications of the current findings. Firstly, the evidence that anticipated emotions play an important role in decision making about resource allocation, together with the evidence from the studies reported in Chapter 5 showing that down-regulating participants’ anticipated emotions influenced participants’ behaviour when allocating tokens, points to ways in which people could be encouraged to make more
‘rational’ decisions (meaning decisions that serve their own interests). The manipulation used was a simple instruction to make a decision in a detached and dispassionate way and is
therefore short and easy to administer. The result (irrespective of participants’ SVO) was that they behaved in a less fair manner (i.e., distributing tokens more unequally between allocator and receiver, in a way that favoured the allocator) than in the control condition. This suggests that the ability to down-regulate emotions could be used to encourage individuals to make decisions in a way that serves their own interests.
The effects of manipulating the anticipation of emotions may also have social benefits by increasing cooperation and encouraging individuals to allocate resources more equally through up-regulating cooperative emotions. Admittedly, in the present research the effects of the up-regulating condition were not significant. However, this finding (or lack thereof) needs to be considered in light of the fact that the current student samples tended to be prosocial in terms of their dispositional SVO. As a result, baseline levels of fairness and cooperative emotions may have been high to begin with and there simply may not have been any room to up-regulate these cooperative emotions further, leading to a ceiling effect in fairness. In addition, it may have been easier to get prosocial individuals, who normally anticipate cooperative emotions, to detach themselves from such emotions and to make less equal resource allocation decisions, than it is to get proself individuals, who would normally anticipate competitive emotions, to detach themselves from these emotions and to make more equal resource allocation decisions as a result. In any case, future research should systematically examine the consequences of emotion regulation manipulations for decision making in social dilemmas. For example, perhaps it is easier to find effects of up-regulating cooperative emotions in contexts where people are generally less inclined to act fairly or pro-socially, like volunteering time for a cause. It could also be interesting to investigate the effect of down-regulating competitive emotions in a setting where competitive emotions are more socially appropriate, like in sports.
The anticipated emotions that were the focus of the current research can be categorised into one of two groups: cooperative, other-regarding emotions (e.g., pride about being fair and regret and guilt about being unfair) and competitive, self-regarding emotions (e.g., regret and guilt about being fair and pride about being unfair). Thus the cooperative emotions studied here could be replaced by alternative other-regarding emotions, such as compassion. Research has shown that compassion towards others, such as caring about others who are suffering, predicts cooperative behaviour (Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010).
This suggests that if the current research were to be replicated in a different context, for example a natural disaster setting in which there is an opportunity to offer aid to victims, helping behaviour would be more likely on the part of those who anticipate feeling compassion towards the victims. By the same token, competitive emotions could be replaced by alternative self-regarding emotional traits, such as high self-esteem. Research has found that individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to engage in non-cooperative behaviour (Kagan & Knight, 1979; Tjosvold, XueHuang, Johnson, & Johnson, 2008). However, there are conflicting findings concerning the influence of self-esteem on prosocial behaviour. For example, Lu and Argyle (1991) found that self-esteem can increase cooperation. Thus the relation between self-esteem and cooperative behaviour is not a simple one. Nevertheless, the specific emotions studied in the present thesis could perhaps be extended to include other relevant other-regarding and/or self-regarding emotions that might play a key role in shaping prosocial or proself behaviour in different social contexts.
Although the studies reported in Chapter 4 were intended to replicate the findings reported in Chapter 3 on a sample with a different cultural background, they were also designed to investigate whether making a receiver’s social identity known to the allocator would influence the allocator’s behaviour. Given the history and background of community relations in Malaysia, it was predicted that Malaysian participants would exhibit ingroup
favouritism in their allocation behaviour. Had this been the case, the results would have had implications for strategies to improve inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia, for example by raising awareness of the role of anticipated emotions in making resource allocation decisions between ingroup and outgroup members. However, the results were unexpected, in that there was no evidence of ingroup favouritism. Here it can be argued that the way in which the receiver’s social identity was manipulated (by means of giving them an ethnically-marked first name) may have encouraged allocators to make more equal allocations than they would have done if the receiver’s social identity had been varied in a more anonymous way (e.g., by referring to him or her as ‘Person 12 from the Chinese group’ or ‘Person 3 from the Indian group’). Past research has found that allocators in the dictator game gave more to a named receiver as compared to an anonymous person (Charness & Gneezy, 2008). It was reasoned that individuals behave more favourably towards people with whom they perceived to have a close social distance, commonly defined in terms of race, religion, occupation or nationality (Bohnet & Frey, 1999; Triandis, Hall, & Ewen, 1965). With the data collected in the present research, I cannot compare allocation behaviour to an anonymous person with that to a named person. Future studies could compare two types of manipulations of social identity (named outgroup receiver, as in the present studies, or an anonymous outgroup receiver, perhaps represented by an ethnically marked avatar). This would tell us whether knowing something about the personal identity of an outgroup receiver (i.e., their name) makes a difference in allocation behaviour. If it is found that participants are more equal in their allocation decisions when some individuating information about the receiver is made available, this would suggest a way in which ingroup favouritism in multi-ethnic societies such as Malaysia could be reduced. On a broader level, such research could help to increase donations to charitable sites, where messages revealing the name of an individual outgroup recipient of charitable donations might serve to enhance donations compared to messages in
which it is clear that the recipients would be outgroup members but in other respects they remain anonymous.
6.4 Limitations and Future Research