Investigating the Impact of Offer Frame Manipulations On Responders Playing The Ultimatum Game

Abstract

The present study was designed to test the impact of frame manipulations on the decision making of responders playing the ultimatum game. Experiment 1 investigated responders event related potentials (ERPs) measured in response to the offers as a function of the frame (i.e., negative: the proposer keeps versus positive the proposer offers). While no difference in acceptation rate was found as a function of the offers frame, electrophysiological results suggest that the stronger negative affective response to the offers in the negative frame (N400) was successfully reappraised by the responders (P600), possibly explaining why the offer frame manipulation did not modulate acceptation rates. No framing effect was found when the ultimatum game was played in its one-shot version (Experiment 2), suggesting that repeated measurements did not affect responders behavior. However, an offer framing effect was found in female (but not in male) responders, when the players cognitive charge was increased using more complex game rules (Experiment 3), presumably reflecting women's greater affective responses to negative outcomes. Taken together, these results suggest that framing manipulations are associated with complex affective and cognitive processes, supporting the cognitive affective tradeoff model.