What are the effects of national pride on prosocial behaviors? The moderating influences of group type and loyalty

Pride, according to the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary, is defined as “feeling of pleasure or satisfaction that people experience when they, or others with whom they are connected, have achieved a venerated accomplishment or own something that others admire”. It is also an important and positive moral emotion. Previous studies have found that pride is related to prosocial behaviors. In recent years, scholars have focused increasingly on collective pride, which is a phenomenon experienced by an individual due to the achievements of their in-group or arising from a sense of superiority over those of out-groups. For example, for all those belonging to the “Chinese” nationality, this identity has become a status symbol for this group. When it comes to accumulating social cohesion among people, or carrying on one’s traditional culture, one can never overemphasize the importance of national pride. However, the effects of national pride on prosocial behaviors remain unknown. The question then arises, are people more inclusive or exclusive to members of other groups with the increasing patriotic-based education in China? There are certain economic games that are typical paradigms used to measure prosocial behaviors, which were then adopted by this study for data collection. This research recruited adult Chinese citizens for its participants. In Experiment 1, we utilized emotional pictures as priming materials, with the Dictator and Ultimatum Games used as measuring paradigms. For Experiment 2, we used texts and the Trust Game to measure the prosocial behaviors enacted towards in-group (Chinese) versus out-group members (non-Chinese). We then used a between-subject design and divided the participants into three priming groups. From there, we measured their national loyalty using the loyalty subscale of The Moral Foundations Questionnaire and divided them into either the high or the low loyalty group, according to their scores. The results show that individuals in the high loyalty group were more likely to experience an intragroup preference. Furthermore, national pride priming weakened participants’ in-group preferences and increased the degree of fairness and trust experienced among high loyalty people. In summary, our study provides evidence that group-level pride is related to prosociality. Future studies may discriminate national pride from that arising from different sources, use other materials that trigger national pride, identify more reliable measurements of national pride, and explore other personality traits that may influence the effects of national pride on prosocial behaviors. To expand upon this research, more studies must be carried out in order to explore the mechanism of influence of national pride on peoples’ prosocial behaviors.