Social Psychology and the Willingness of Different Citizens to Participate in a Car Lottery

Abstract

To investigate citizens’ participation behavior in the lottery under the influence of the license plate lottery policy (LPLP) and to guide them to participate in the lottery rationally, this paper, based on social psychology and combined with the theory of planned behavior, divides citizens into citizens with cars in their households and citizens without cars in their households. This study then separately constructs structural equation models, sets perceived car necessity (PCN), perceived behavioral control (PBC), attitude toward car ownership (ATT), and subjective norms (SN), respectively. These four psychological latent variables were used to analyze the participation behavior of different categories of citizens in the car lottery from the perspective of psychological factors. Our empirical study found that there are significant differences in age and the number of people living together. The mechanism of their intention to participate in the car lottery and the psychological factors are different. The psychological factors affecting the intention of people with a car and people without a car to participate in the car lottery are SN > ATT > PCN > PBC and ATT > SN > PBC, respectively. Our research results can help to identify the internal factors and mechanisms that influence citizens’ intention to participate in the car lottery and help government administrators to optimize the LPLP.