Misfortune may be a blessing in disguise: Fairness perception and emotion modulate decision making

Abstract

Fairness perception and equality during social interactions frequently elicit affective arousal and affect decision making. By integrating the dictator game and a probabilistic gambling task, this study aimed to investigate the effects of a negative experience induced by perceived unfairness on decision making using behavioral, model fitting, and electrophysiological approaches. Participants were randomly assigned to the neutral, harsh, or kind groups, which consisted of various asset allocation scenarios to induce different levels of perceived unfairness. The monetary gain was subsequently considered the initial asset in a negatively rewarded, probabilistic gambling task in which the participants were instructed to maintain as much asset as possible. Our behavioral results indicated that the participants in the harsh group exhibited increased levels of negative emotions but retained greater total game scores than the participants in the other two groups. Parameter estimation of a reinforcement learning model using a Bayesian approach indicated that these participants were more loss aversive and consistent in decision making. Data from simultaneous ERP recordings further demonstrated that these participants exhibited larger feedback-related negativity to unexpected outcomes in the gambling task, which suggests enhanced reward sensitivity and signaling of reward prediction error. Collectively, our study suggests that a negative experience may be an advantage in the modulation of reward-based decision making.

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

“…Previous studies have found that RewP amplitudes were modulated by short-term emotional experiences (Hajcak et al, 2003 ; Bress et al, 2015 ; Kaltwasser et al, 2016 ). For example, Liu et al ( 2017 ) found that negative emotional arousal increased the sensitivity to RPEs, and then elicited larger RewP amplitudes. In their study, participants joined a dictator game (a modified ultimatum game) first and then joined a gambling task.…”

“…They found that larger RewP amplitudes were elicited in the gambling task when participants experienced harsh treatment (gained less than the opponents) in the dictator game than when they experienced favorable treatment (gained more than the opponents) or equal treatment (gained equal to the opponents). Liu et al ( 2017 ) proposed that participants who received harsh treatment were in disadvantageous circumstances. The disadvantageous circumstances would arouse the participants’ negative emotions and then intensify the RPE signals to elicit larger RewP amplitudes.…”

“…In addition to RewP, P3 has also been frequently observed in outcome evaluation studies (Chen et al, 2013 ; Liu et al, 2017 ). P3 refers to a positive deflection within a 300–700-ms time window following RewP (Kreussel et al, 2012 ; Martin, 2012 ).…”

“…Specifically, P3 amplitudes were modulated by several context-related factors, such as social comparison and the magnitude of the outcome during outcome evaluation (Yeung and Sanfey, 2004 ; Wu and Zhou, 2009 ; Wu et al, 2012 ). Additionally, the P3 component has also been found to be related to the aversion effect during evaluation of unequal outcome (Chen et al, 2013 ; Liu et al, 2017 ).…”

Fairness or benefit? The effect of power on distributive fairness

“…们 究 竟 是 怎 样 在 公 平 和 利 益 之 间 进 行 权 衡 的 (Andersen, Gneezy, Kajackaite, & Marx, 2018;Aoki, Yomogida, & Matsumoto, 2015)。最经典的研究是采 用涉及自我和他人利害关系的博弈论范式(特别是 独 裁 者 博 弈 和 最 后 通 牒 博 弈 )开 展 的 研 究 (Güth, Schmittberger, & Schwarze, 1982;Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986;Thaler, 1988)。一般的结论是, 人们 并非像传统经济学设想的那样唯利是图, 公平偏好 在 经 济 决 策 任 务 上 扮 演 着 同 样 重 要 的 角 色 (L iu, A c t a P s y c h o l o g i c a S i n i c a Hwang, Hsieh, Hsu, & Lai, 2017;Weiland, Hewig, Hecht, Mussel, & Miltner, 2012)。 这常常被作为人们 并非纯粹理性经济人论断的证据 (Güth et al, 1982;Weiland et al, 2012) (Bechtel, Liesch, & Scheve, 2018;Fehr & Schimdt, 1999;Gao et al, 2018;Yu, Calder, & Mobbs, 2014 Dawes, Fowler, Johnson, McElreath, & Smirnov, 2007;DeScioli et al, 2014) Abstract Distributive fairness is a basic behavioral norm and an important pursuit in our daily life, and it plays an important role in our social interactions. In studies of distributive fairness, individuals' fairness perception and the factors affecting it have gathered much research attention.…”