The role of cognitive and emotional perspective taking in economic decision making in the ultimatum game.

Haruto Takagishi,Toshio Yamagishi,Michiko Koizumi,Shinya Kameshima,Takayuki Fujii,Joanna Schug

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0108462

Abstract

We conducted a simple resource allocation game known as the ultimatum game (UG) with preschoolers to examine the role of cognitive and emotional perspective-taking ability on allocation and rejection behavior. A total of 146 preschoolers played the UG and completed a false belief task and an emotional perspective-taking test. Results showed that cognitive perspective taking ability had a significant positive effect on the proposer’s offer and a negative effect on the responder’s rejection behavior, whereas emotional perspective taking ability did not impact either the proposer’s or responder’s behavior. These results imply that the ability to anticipate the responder’s beliefs, but not their emotional state, plays an important role in the proposer’s choice of a fair allocation in an UG, and that children who have not acquired theory of mind still reject unfair offers.

Highlights

Altruistic behavior between genetically unrelated individuals is a defining feature of human society [1,2,3]
We examined the relationship between cognitive perspective taking (Sally-Anne task) and emotional perspective taking (APT)
The lack of an effect of emotional perspective taking observed in our study is consistent with implications of a recent brain-lesion study which found that activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was related to emotional perspective-taking ability but not cognitive perspective-taking ability [22,23,24]

Summary

Introduction

Altruistic behavior between genetically unrelated individuals is a defining feature of human society [1,2,3]. Preschoolers who had acquired ToM anticipated that the responder would reject unfair offers and made their allocation Together, these studies provide strong support for the idea that ToM, or the cognitive ability to infer the mental states of others, plays an important role in proposers’ behavior in the UG. It has been well established that adult responders’ rejection of unfair offers is based on their inference of proposers’ intentions: Very few adult responders reject an unfair offer in the UG when they are aware that the unfair offer was made unintentionally by a proposer whose choice was limited to only unfair offers [27,28,29] This finding suggests that inference of intentionality is a prerequisite for rejecting unfair offers in the UG, and cognitive perspective-taking ability, but not emotional perspectivetaking ability, should be positively related to rejection behavior

Materials and Methods

Results

Discussion