Medial frontal negativity reflects advantageous inequality aversion of proposers in the ultimatum game: An ERP study

Abstract

Inequality aversion is a typical form of fairness preferences, which can explain the behaviors in many social exchange situations such as the ultimatum game (UG). There are two kinds of inequality aversion—disadvantageous inequality aversion of responders and advantageous inequality aversion of proposers in the ultimatum game. Although neuroscience research has reported neural correlates of disadvantageous inequality aversion, there are still debates about advantageous inequality aversion of proposers. In this paper, we developed a variant of ultimatum game in which participants played the UG as proposers. On each trial, first, the offer was randomly presented, then, participants as proposers decided whether to choose this offer; next, responders decided whether to accept or not. Offers that responders got 1–20% of the pie are defined as advantageous unfair offers of proposers, whereas offers that responders got 31–50% are defined as fair offers. Event-related brain potentials recorded from the participants showed that more negative-going medial frontal negativity (MFN) was elicited by advantageous unfair offers compared to fair offers in the early time window (250–350ms), which suggested that proposers were averse to advantageous inequality.