Hello handsome! Male's facial attractiveness gives rise to female's fairness bias in Ultimatum Game scenarios-An ERP study.

Qingguo Ma,Da Qian,Linfeng Hu,Lei Wang,Ian D Stephen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0180459

Abstract

The current study delineated how male proposers’ facial attractiveness affect female responders’ fairness considerations and their subsequent decision outcome during the Ultimatum Game (UG). Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 17 female subjects, who played the role as responders and had to decide whether to accept offers from either attractive or unattractive male proposers. Behavioral data (Acceptance Ratio and Response time) revealed that, more offers were accepted from attractive-face conditions; subjects typically responded quicker to unfair offers from unattractive proposers as compared with slower to unfair offers from attractive proposers. The ERP data demonstrated similar N2 amplitudes elicited by both attractive and unattractive faces, and a larger early frontal LPP elicited by the attractive faces compared with unattractive ones, but no significant differences of both late posterior LPP and typical parietal LPP amplitudes were observed between these two face conditions, which was different from our previous study with similar paradigm but male participants. The results suggest that, in comparison to males, females might not experience the potential attention bias towards unattractive opposite-sex faces and are less likely to possess an enhanced processing and evaluation of those faces. This phenomenon might be explained by endogenous gender differences in mate preference. The feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300 responses during an offer presentation were further measured in both attractive-face and unattractive-face conditions and the results demonstrated that the amplitudes elicited by fair and unfair offers were not statistically different in the former condition, but were different in the latter condition. More specifically, unfair offers generated larger FRN and smaller P300 than fair ones in the unattractive-face condition. Findings suggest that, although females tend to possess less salient evaluation of male’s facial attractiveness, the attractiveness of male proposers would still attenuate female responders’ fairness consideration during the UG.

Highlights

As a classical example of economic games, the Ultimatum Game (UG) developed by Guth and colleagues [1], is frequently adopted to investigate how individuals make strategic decisions during social interactions
In the light of the above RL-theory, many existing studies found that unfair offers elicited a more negative-going feedback-related negativity (FRN) compared to fair offers and these results suggested that, the FRN reflects a rapid impression as to whether outcomes violate social norms [37, 39, 45]
The post-hoc comparisons showed that acceptance ratio of fair offer (5:5) was significantly higher than unfair offers (1:9) (t(16) = 7.172, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 1.74), (2:8) (t(16) = 6.319, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 1.53), and mid-value offer (3:7) (t(16) = 4.910, p = 0.002, Cohen’s d = 1.14), but there was no significant difference (t(16) = 2.048, p = 0.545, Cohen’s d = 0.50) observed between fair offers (4:6) and (5:5)

Summary

Introduction

As a classical example of economic games, the Ultimatum Game (UG) developed by Guth and colleagues [1], is frequently adopted to investigate how individuals make strategic decisions during social interactions. This game enables scholars to study how people respond to offers on the basis of different fairness levels. Take social distance for example, Wu et al [11] adopted a dictator game to explore the effect of social distance on people’s fairness evaluation They observed different expectancy of social norm violation between friends and strangers, and in turn, suggested that social distance could modulate the evaluation of this violation

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