Bargaining with characters: How personality pathology affects behavior in the ultimatum and dictator games

Abstract

Although disorders of personality are associated with a range of interpersonal difficulties, little is known about how knowledge of a partner's personality pathology affects behavior in bargaining situations. We asked study participants to play two economic games with virtual confederates. Participants were told that the confederates had been interviewed and were now portrayed using brief vignettes. The vignettes described one of eight DSM-5 personality disorders and a control (no personality pathology) vignette. In Experiment 1, participants played either the role of proposer (specifying offers) or responder (specifying minimum acceptable offers) in an Ultimatum game. In the role of proposer, participants made lower offers to the avoidant, histrionic, antisocial, narcissistic, schizotypal, dependent, and borderline vignettes in comparison to the control vignette. In the role of responder, participants showed no differences among vignettes with respect to responder minimum acceptable offers. To isolate the effects of fairness or altruism, we conducted a second experiment in which participants played the role of allocator in a Dictator game. Participants made lower allocations to vignettes depicting schizoid, histrionic, antisocial, narcissistic, dependent, and borderline personality disorders compared to the control vignette. Taken together, these findings suggest that knowledge of personality pathology plays a role in bargaining situations.