Abstract
The present study was designed to investigate the effects of help intentionality and harm doing on compensation. Subjects were 40 male students.
A pair of dyad, subject and confederate, competed with another pair in the game. The experimenter manipulated the game in such a way that subject's contributions were forty percent of his partner's. All subjects and their partners were told that the winning pair were given a thousand yen as a prize and the losing pair could gain only six hundred yen. Then, in the voluntary condition, the confederate was willing to allocate their rewards equally (intentionally altruistic sharing). In the compulsory condition, the experimenter compelled the confederate to allocate their rewards equally (compulsory altruistic sharing).
Data suggested that a feeling of sorrow was stronger among recipients when altruistic sharing was compulsory than when it was voluntary. The results also revealed that subjects who harmed their partner were willing to compensate them.
