Social value orientation and college students' aggressive behaviors: the chain mediating effect of perspective taking and general trust.

To explore the chain mediating effect of perspective taking and general trust between social value orientation and college students' aggressive behavior, and to provide scientific evidence for promoting college students' mental health and reducing campus violence. The current study adopts a combination of cluster sampling and convenience sampling methods, selecting 1,994 students from 6 universities in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Henan, Tianjin, and Xizang provinces. The measurements include the Social Value Orientation Slider Measure (SVO-SM), the Perspective Taking sub-scale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI-PT), the General Trust Scale (GTS), and the Short-Form Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ-SF). The results show that the scores of social value orientation, perspective taking, and general trust are all positively correlated with each other, and all three are negatively correlated with aggressive behavior. The mediation effect analysis indicates that social value orientation can predict aggressive behavior through perspective taking, general trust, and the mediating chain of the two, with the mediation effects of the three paths being 9.017%, 4.378%, and 0.947% respectively. This suggests that perspective taking and general trust of college students have multiple mediating effects between social value orientation and aggressive behavior. The present associations provide preliminary implications for college education practices centered on prosocial skill development, which tend to correspond to a lower prevalence of campus bullying and aggressive conduct.