Abstract
Economic status played an important role in the modulation of economic decision making. The present fMRI study aimed at investigating how economic status modulated behavioral and neural responses to unfairness in a modified Ultimatum Game (UG). During scanning, participants played as responders in the UG, and they were informed of the economic status of proposers before receiving offers. At the behavioral level, higher rejection rates and lower fairness ratings were revealed when proposers were in high economic status than in low economic status. Besides, the most time-consuming decisions tended to occur at lower unfairness level when the proposers were in high (relative to low) economic status. At the neural level, stronger activation of left thalamus was revealed when fair offers were proposed by proposers in high rather than in low economic status. Greater activation of right medial prefrontal cortex was revealed during acceptance to unfair offers in high economic status condition rather than in low economic status condition. Taken together, these findings shed light on the significance of proposers’ economic status in responders’ social decision making in UG.
Highlights
Human behaviors in social decision-making are under the influence of unfairness-related decision making
Paired t-tests revealed higher ratings in the Low economic status condition relative to the High economic status condition whether the offers were fair [t(17) = 7.42, p < 0.01, Cohen’s d = 0.50] or not [t(17) = 2.12, p < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 1.75]
Further paired t-tests showed that, participants accepted all the fair offers, they rejected some of the unfair offers
Summary
Human behaviors in social decision-making are under the influence of unfairness-related decision making. Among all the economic games, Ultimatum Game (UG) is a primary experimental tool used to explore the underlying mechanisms of human fairness (Guth et al, 1982; Thaler, 1988; Camerer and Thaler, 1995). A typical UG involves two players, one player (proposer) decides how to split a sum of money, and the other one (responder) decides whether to accept the division or not. Both of them get the suggested division of money, otherwise they received nothing. In spite of personal loss, people would reject extremely unfair offers to punish normviolating behaviors (Guth et al, 1982), indicating the importance of perception of unfairness in social decision making
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