Give Me a Chance! Sense of Opportunity Inequality Affects Brain Responses to Outcome Evaluation in a Social Competitive Context: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

People are strongly motivated to pursue social equality during social interactions. Previous studies have shown that outcome equality influences the neural activities of monetary feedback processing in socioeconomic games; however, it remains unclear whether perception of opportunity equality affects outcome evaluation even when outcomes are maintained equal. The current study investigated the electrophysiological activities of outcome evaluation in different instructed opportunity equality conditions with event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to play a competitive dice game against an opponent to win money. Opportunity equality was manipulated in three conditions, depending on whether participants were allowed the opportunity to throw less, equal, or more dice compared to their opponents. Although participants received a winning outcome with approximately 50% chance in all equality conditions, they selectively exhibited sensitivity to the less-dice condition by reporting stronger feelings of unfairness and unpleasantness than in the equal and more-dice conditions. In line with the behavioral results, larger reward positivity amplitudes were elicited by the monetary outcome in the less-dice condition than in the other two conditions, reflecting intensified reward prediction error (RPE) signals under negative emotional arousal. Further, P3 amplitudes were enhanced following reward feedback only in the unequal conditions, perhaps due to the high-level motivational and affective processing associated with resolving conflict between social norms and self-interest. The present findings elucidate the complex temporal course of outcome evaluation processes in different opportunity equality conditions.

A sense of unfairness reduces charitable giving to a third-party: Evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological data

“…Notably, we did not observe an obvious MFN component that is frequently reported (Polezzi et al, 2008;Boksem and De Cremer, 2010;Hewig et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2011a;Alexopoulos et al, 2012;Hu et al, 2014;Ma et al, 2015Ma et al, , 2017Long et al, 2018). Given that the MFN commonly overlaps with later positive deflections, such as P300, we ran a spatiotemporal principal component analysis (PCA) to parse the ERP waveform into its underlying constituent components (Foti et al, 2009).…”

“…Event-related potential (ERP) studies have identified several components of the neural processes involved in interpreting and responding to unfair proposals. First, the medial frontal negativity (MFN, or feedback-related negativity, FRN) was found to be more sensitive to unfair offers in studies those adopted UG paradigm (Polezzi et al, 2008;Boksem and De Cremer, 2010;Hewig et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2011a;Alexopoulos et al, 2012;Hu et al, 2014;Ma et al, 2015Ma et al, , 2017Long et al, 2018). Specifically, the MFN reflects the discrepancy between an expected outcome and the actual outcome; i.e., a larger discrepancy elicits a greater MFN amplitude (Holroyd and Coles, 2002).…”

Racial Ingroup Bias and Efficiency Consideration Influence Distributive Decisions: A Dynamic Analysis of Time Domain and Time Frequency

“…Due to the fact that N170 is most appropriately measured at lateral parieto-occipital sites ( Rossion and Jacques, 2008 ; Almeida et al, 2016 ), in the current study, the N170 mean amplitude was analyzed with four electrode sites (P5 and P7 for the left hemisphere, P6 and P8 for the right hemisphere) in the time window of 140–200 ms. Previous studies have found that P300 appears in the parietal lobe and usually peaks at the midline electrodes on the scalp ( Delplanque et al, 2004 ; Wu and Zhou, 2009 ; Long et al, 2018 ). To explore the P300 effect in the present paradigm, the mean amplitude of P300 was measured in the 200–600-ms time window at CPz, Pz, and POz.…”

The Effect of Task Difficulty and Self-Contribution on Fairness Consideration: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…High temporal resolution event-related potentials (ERPs) can show the time course of brain processing, including processes related to cognition, emotion, and decision-making ( Hillyard and Picton, 2011 ; Luck, 2014 ). Previous electroencephalogram (EEG) studies investigating the neurophysiological characteristics of fairness consideration in UG decision-making have suggested that unfair offers may induce more negative FRN (feedback-related negativity) amplitudes than fair offers, particularly in recipients with high fairness concerns ( Ma et al, 2017 ; Long et al, 2018 ; Jin et al, 2020 ). The FRN is a negative deflection component that appears 200 ~ 350 ms after stimulus onset ( Ma et al, 2015 ; Massi and Luhmann, 2015 ; Sambrook and Goslin, 2015 ).…”