A Difference of Past Self-Evaluation Between College Students With Low and High Socioeconomic Status: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

Relationship Between Socioeconomic Status and Win-Win Values: Mediating Roles of Childhood Neglect and Self-Continuity

The family plays a key role on the development of children. One with low socioeconomic status was more likely to suffer childhood neglect, which might impact on development of self-continuity and win-win values. Using cross-sectional data from 489 participants, this study conducted a mediation model to examine the roles of childhood neglect and self-continuity between socioeconomic status and win-win values. Our results showed that childhood neglect and self-continuity fully mediated the effect of socioeconomic status on win-win values. Specifically, socioeconomic status might affect win-win values through three roles: the individual mediating role of childhood neglect, the individual mediating role of self-continuity, and the multiple mediation roles of childhood neglect and self-continuity.

Renting vs. Owning: Public Stereotypes of Housing Consumption Decision From the Perspective of Confucian Culture: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

The ideas of face consciousness, group conformity, extended family concept, and crisis consciousness in Confucian culture have a subtle and far-reaching impact on housing consumption decision among the Chinese public, forming a housing consumption model of "preferring to own a house rather than rent one." The poor interaction between the housing rental market and the sales market caused by the shortage of rental demand and irrational purchasing behaviors has led to soaring house prices and imbalance between supply and demand that prevail in major cities in China. To gain a deeper understanding of public cognitive attitude toward decisions on owning and renting a house, this study divided the subjects into high and low impact groups based on the overall Confucian culture and four subdimensions. It attempts to take a cognitive neuroscience approach for assessing public stereotypes of housing consumption decision with different types based on the analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs). The results are as follows. First, overall, there is an obvious implicit stereotype of renting a house and explicit stereotype of owning a house among the public. Second, ERPs data show that descriptions of renting a house with positive adjectives could evoke more significant N400 responses. In other words, in the heuristic system, the public perceive that renting a house is restrictive, stressful, unhappy, and crisis. Data from subjective reports show that, after processing information in the analytic system, the public tend to think that owning a house is self-contained, restful, warm, and comfortable. Third, a more negative stereotype of renting a house exists in the high Confucian culture influence group (HIC) Group than in the low Confucian culture influence group (LIC) Group, and is more inclined to own a home. Fourth, under the Confucian culture sub-dimension, there are differences in housing consumption stereotypes between high and low groups in terms of extended family concept, group conformity, and crisis consciousness. Fifth, the moderating effect analysis found that perceived usefulness, trust in the rental market, and policy perception can be important factors in guiding public housing consumption stereotypes.

Social Class Priming Effect on Prosociality: Evidence from Explicit and Implicit Measures

Although abundant research has explored the relationship between social class and prosociality, it remains controversial. This study aimed to investigate the effect of social class priming on prosociality among college students. Experiment 1 was an explicit experiment in which we employed the MacArthur scale to prime participants’ social class and then used a donation task. The results showed that students in a low social class priming group had more donation behaviors compared to ones in a high social class priming group. Experiment 2 was an implicit experiment in which we used a single category implicit association test (SC-IAT) to investigate the relationship between the self-concepts of different social classes and prosociality after priming participants’ social class. The results indicated that students in a low social class priming condition had a stronger connection between self-concepts and prosocial inclinations than ones in a high social class priming condition. Thus, our study demonstrated that students primed with low social class were more prosocial than those primed with high social class, and supported the empathy-altruism theory of prosocial behavior. These findings are of great practical significance to promote prosocial behavior of individuals of different social classes.