Fear of Rejection or Concern for Fairness: The Proposer's Offering Behavior in the Ultimatum Game

Lying about money and game points by men and women and its relation to the Self-Reported Lying Scale

Introduction

The present study was designed to examine the effect of monetary and non-monetary endowment on lying by men and women in the Ultimatum Game. Another goal was to examine to what extent the Self-Reported Lying Scale (SRLS), described here for the first time, predicts lying in the Ultimatum Game.

Methods

Examinees (162, 82 women) were allocated to four experimental conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Two endowment conditions (money and game points) were crossed with two sex conditions (men and women). Participants underwent an Ultimatum Game in which they were permitted to conceal part of the endowment from an unidentified partner. Finally, participants completed the SRLS.

Results

The results indicated that more cash than points were concealed from the partner, and men concealed more of their endowment than women. We further defined fake fairness in sharing that combined hiding a more significant portion of the endowment from the partner while presenting fair sharing of the remaining award. We found more fake fairness when money was shared than when points were concealed. Fake fairness is more significant for men than for women. For money and points alike, concealment was predicted by the global score of the SRLS and its five subscales (self-assessed lying ability, lie detection ability, the use of reason in lying, lie acceptability, and lie frequency).

Discussion

It was suggested that a monetary endowment is more sensitive to lying than game points and involves more fake fairness. Nevertheless, the differences are quantitative, and the same response pattern exists in the two endowment conditions. Replacing money with points is a proper solution whenever a monetary endowment presents difficulties. It was further suggested that sex differences exist in lying using an asymmetric information UG, where proposers were permitted to mislead responders about their endowment. Finally, the SRLS may contribute to a better understanding of the question of who lies.

Influences of a Luck Game on Offers in Ultimatum and Dictator Games: Is There a Mediation of Emotions?

The ultimatum (UG) and dictator (DG) games are two tasks where a sum of money has to be divided between two players: a proposer and a receiver. Following the rational choice theory, proposers should offer the minimum in the UG and nothing in the DG, due to the presence/absence of the receivers' bargaining power. The fact that people generally make non-negligible offers in both games has suggested divergent explicative hypotheses and has generated extensive research to examine exogenous and endogenous factors underlying such decisions. Among the contextual factors affecting the proposers' offers, the sense of entitlement or of ownership has been shown to reduce offers significantly. A frequent way to induce the sense of entitlement/ownership has been to assign the role of proposer to the player who apparently has better scored in skill tasks executed before the UG or DG or has more contributed, through a previous luck game, to the amount to be shared. Such manipulations, however, could produce a possible overlapping between "ownership" and "merit," that in this study we aimed to disentangle. We manipulated the participants' initial endowment through a luck game, by increasing, decreasing or leaving it unchanged, to investigate whether winnings or losses by chance influenced offers in UG and DG in similar or different ways depending on their respective features. All participants played as proposers but this role was apparently random and disconnected from the outcomes of the luck game. Furthermore, we investigated whether the putative effect of experimental manipulation was mediated by the changes in emotions elicited by the luck game and/or by the emotions and beliefs related to decision-making. We used a non-economic version of the games, in which tokens were divided instead of money. In the study, 300 unpaid undergraduates (M = 152) from different degree programs, aged between 18 and 42 years, participated. The results revealed that the effect of outcome manipulation on offers was moderated by the specific structure of the UG and DG. Instead, emotional reactions barely mediated the effect of the experimental manipulation, suggesting that their role in those decisions is less relevant than is assumed in the literature.

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

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.