Abstract:

People’s perception of social justice affects their political trust, which influences their cooperation with government. Mass incidents, which refer to the conflicts between certain civilians and local administration, are typical non-cooperative behavior in China. However, for the lack of empirical research on the relationship between cooperation and social justice or political trust, there is no investigation on the process and condition on mechanism of cooperation. In this research, social justice is divided into distributive justice and procedural justice, and political trust is divided into instrumental trust and affective trust. This study will focus on social psychological mechanism of social justice and cooperation with the methods of laboratory experiment, field experiment and questionnaire survey, and it aims to construct the dual-pathway model of cooperation by instrumental trust and affective trust. Furthermore, this study will also explore the moderating roles of outcome dependence on the relationship between social justice and cooperation. An important theoretical implication of this study is that it will construct the dual-pathway model of cooperation and its moderate mechanism. Regarding practical implications, this research will examine the social psychological mechanism underlying cooperation with government in China by examining motivation, thus informing administrators and policy makers on how to promote intergroup cooperation in response to public administration.

Key words: social justice, instrumental trust, affective trust, outcome dependence, cooperation