Insensitivity to Unethical Behavior in Dictator Game When Indirectly Intermediated-Implications of Indirect Blindness for Safety Management

Atsuo Murata

doi:10.4236/jbbs.2016.65020

Abstract

The aim of this study was to demonstrate that indirect mediation in behaviors leads to insensitivity to unethical behavior through a dictator game and to give some implications for safety management. The indirect involvement in the unethical behavior such as the violation of regulation is believed to lessen the responsibility and the criticism from others for the unethical behavior as compared to the direct involvement in it. The instruction condition for the evaluator of behavior in a dictator game was taken up as an experimental variable. Instruction condition 1 was to pay attention to the behavior of only a dictator. In instruction condition 2, the participant (evaluator) was required to review all players’ behavior and evaluate a dictator. It has been investigated whether allowing indirect actions (mediations) leads to reduced punishment as a function of the instruction condition. While the punishment to the indirectness did not get smaller for instruction condition 2, the punishment to the indirectness tended to get smaller only for instruction condition 1.

Highlights

Many studies have been carried out on punishment and fairness from the perspectives of both experimentalHow to cite this paper: Murata, A. (2016) Insensitivity to Unethical Behavior in Dictator Game When Indirectly IntermediatedImplications of Indirect Blindness for Safety Management
A two-way (involvement in the dictator game by instruction condition) analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on the amount of punishment
Under instruction condition 1, Player D’s amount of punishment to Player A in the direct condition was larger than that in the indirect condition (see Figure 4(a)). This indicates that indirect intermediation by selling the right to play dictator game (DG) to Player B leads to less punishment

Summary

Introduction

Many studies have been carried out on punishment and fairness from the perspectives of both experimentalHow to cite this paper: Murata, A. (2016) Insensitivity to Unethical Behavior in Dictator Game When Indirectly IntermediatedImplications of Indirect Blindness for Safety Management. Many studies have been carried out on punishment and fairness from the perspectives of both experimental. How to cite this paper: Murata, A. (2016) Insensitivity to Unethical Behavior in Dictator Game When Indirectly IntermediatedImplications of Indirect Blindness for Safety Management. Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, 6, 199-208. A. Murata economics and applied cognitive psychology. Fehr and Schmidt [2] and Bolton and Ockenfels [3] provided a model of outcome-based fairness for explaining the relationship between punishment and fairness. Charness and Rabin [8] provided experimental evidence that fairness judgment and reciprocity decision are dependent on the welfare of the poorest player. Brandts, and Ockenfels [9] provided experimental evidence that our perception of fairness depends on prior equity

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Conclusion