Less Expectation, Less Pain: Low Wealth Alleviates Sense of Unfairness

Abstract

Objective wealth plays an important role in social interaction and economic decision making. Previous studies indicate that objective wealth of others may influence the way we participate in resources allocation. However, the effect of objective wealth on responses to fairness-related resource distribution is far from clear, as are the underlying neural processes. To address this issue, we dynamically manipulated proposers’ objective wealth and analyzed participants’ behavior as responders in a modified Ultimatum Game, during which event-related potentials were recorded. Behavioral results showed that participants were prone to reject unfair proposals although that rejection would reduce their own benefit. Importantly, participants were more likely to accept unfair offers from proposers with low objective wealth than from proposers with high objective wealth, with a drastic increase in acceptance rates of unfair offers from 32.79 to 50.59%. Further electrophysiological results showed that there was significantly enhanced feedback-related negativity amplitude toward proposers with high (relative to low) objective wealth for unfair offers. Furthermore, the late frontal negativity amplitude was larger for all the conditions which are not high-fair, which might be the only option that did not elicit any ambiguity. These findings suggest a strong role of proposers’ objective wealth in modulating responders’ behavioral and neural responses to fairness.

Cognitive process underlying ultimatum game: An eye-tracking study from a dual-system perspective

“…To motivate the participants' choices, they were told that at the end of the experiment, one of the trials in which they accepted the offer would be selected randomly by the computer and that they would be paid based on that trial. This experimental design is commonly used in UG research (Gaertig et al, 2012 ; Wei et al, 2018 ; Pei et al, 2021 ). We also verbally asked the participants whether they had any questions about the content of the experiment and no one reported that they had doubts about the cover story.…”

Differences in Implicit Attitudes in West and East Germans as Measured by the Go/NoGo Association Task and Event-related EEG Potentials

“…Another ERP component that is considered important for the present context is late frontocentral negativity, also termed medial frontal negativity or N450. Multiple studies have described a broad negative component presumably indexing conflict or ambiguity, beginning at 400+ ms poststimulus, with a maximum over frontocentral brain regions (see Larson et al, 2014, for a review; recent research articles on late negativity ERP components indicative of conflict processing include Chouiter et al, 2014; Kałamała et al, 2020; Pei et al, 2021; Rey-Mermet et al, 2019; and Wagner-Altendorf et al, 2020). For implicit social cognition, the late negativity or frontal slow wave ERP component is thought to reflect the implementation of conflict resolution in order to overcome the prepotent (biased) response tendency (Bartholow, 2010).…”