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Behavioral and neuronal determinants of negative reciprocity in the ultimatum game.

ABSTRACT: The rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game (UG) indicates negative reciprocity. The model of strong reciprocity claims that negative reciprocity reflects prosociality because the rejecting individual is sacrificing resources in order to punish unfair behavior. However, a recent study found that the rejection rate of unfair offers is linked to assertiveness (status defense model). To pursue the question what drives negative reciprocity, the present study investigated individual differences in the rejection of unfair offers along with their behavioral and neuronal determinants. We measured fairness preferences and event-related potentials (ERP) in 200 healthy participants playing a computerized version of the UG with pictures of unfair and fair proposers. Structural equation modeling (SEM) on the behavioral data corroborated both the strong reciprocity and the status defense models of human cooperation: Not only more prosocial but also more assertive individuals were more likely to show negative reciprocity by rejecting unfair offers. Experimental ERP results confirmed the feedback negativity (FN) as a neural signature of fairness processing. Multilevel SEM of brain-behavior relationships revealed that negative reciprocity was significantly associated with individual differences in FN amplitudes in response to proposers. Our results confirm stable individual differences in fairness processing at the behavioral and neuronal level.

SUBMITTER: Kaltwasser L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5040910 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game is no evidence of strong reciprocity.

Project description:The strong reciprocity model of the evolution of human cooperation has gained some acceptance, partly on the basis of support from experimental findings. The observation that unfair offers in the ultimatum game are frequently rejected constitutes an important piece of the experimental evidence for strong reciprocity. In the present study, we have challenged the idea that the rejection response in the ultimatum game provides evidence of the assumption held by strong reciprocity theorists that negative reciprocity observed in the ultimatum game is inseparably related to positive reciprocity as the two sides of a preference for fairness. The prediction of an inseparable relationship between positive and negative reciprocity was rejected on the basis of the results of a series of experiments that we conducted using the ultimatum game, the dictator game, the trust game, and the prisoner's dilemma game. We did not find any correlation between the participants' tendencies to reject unfair offers in the ultimatum game and their tendencies to exhibit various prosocial behaviors in the other games, including their inclinations to positively reciprocate in the trust game. The participants' responses to postexperimental questions add support to the view that the rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game is a tacit strategy for avoiding the imposition of an inferior status.

| S-EPMC3528519 | biostudies-literature

Social learning in the ultimatum game.

Project description:In the ultimatum game, two players divide a sum of money. The proposer suggests how to split and the responder can accept or reject. If the suggestion is rejected, both players get nothing. The rational solution is that the responder accepts even the smallest offer but humans prefer fair share. In this paper, we study the ultimatum game by a learning-mutation process based on quantal response equilibrium, where players are assumed boundedly rational and make mistakes when estimating the payoffs of strategies. Social learning is never stabilized at the fair outcome or the rational outcome, but leads to oscillations from offering 40 percent to 50 percent. To be precise, there is a clear tendency to increase the mean offer if it is lower than 40 percent, but will decrease when it reaches the fair offer. If mutations occur rarely, fair behavior is favored in the limit of local mutation. If mutation rate is sufficiently high, fairness can evolve for both local mutation and global mutation.

| S-EPMC3762740 | biostudies-literature

Generalized Negative Reciprocity in the Dictator Game--How to Interrupt the Chain of Unfairness.

Project description:Humans are tremendously sensitive to unfairness. Unfairness provokes strong negative emotional reactions and influences our subsequent decision making. These decisions might not only have consequences for ourselves and the person who treated us unfairly but can even transmit to innocent third persons--a phenomenon that has been referred to as generalized negative reciprocity. In this study we aimed to investigate whether regulation of emotions can interrupt this chain of unfairness. Real allocations in a dictator game were used to create unfair situations. Three different regulation strategies, namely writing a message to the dictator who made an unfair offer, either forwarded or not forwarded, describing a neutral picture and a control condition in which subjects just had to wait for three minutes, were then tested on their ability to influence the elicited emotions. Subsequently participants were asked to allocate money between themselves and a third person. We show that writing a message which is forwarded to the unfair actor is an effective emotion regulation strategy and that those participants who regulated their emotions successfully by writing a message made higher allocations to a third person. Thus, using message writing as an emotion regulation strategy can interrupt the chain of unfairness.

| S-EPMC4770415 | biostudies-literature

Adaptive role switching promotes fairness in networked ultimatum game.

Project description:In recent years, mechanisms favoring fair split in the ultimatum game have attracted growing interests because of its practical implications for international bargains. In this game, two players are randomly assigned two different roles respectively to split an offer: the proposer suggests how to split and the responder decides whether or not to accept it. Only when both agree is the offer successfully split; otherwise both get nothing. It is of importance and interest to break the symmetry in role assignment especially when the game is repeatedly played in a heterogeneous population. Here we consider an adaptive role assignment: whenever the split fails, the two players switch their roles probabilistically. The results show that this simple feedback mechanism proves much more effective at promoting fairness than other alternatives (where, for example, the role assignment is based on the number of neighbors).

| S-EPMC3607882 | biostudies-other

Power and fairness in a generalized ultimatum game.

Project description:Power is the ability to influence others towards the attainment of specific goals, and it is a fundamental force that shapes behavior at all levels of human existence. Several theories on the nature of power in social life exist, especially in the context of social influence. Yet, in bargaining situations, surprisingly little is known about its role in shaping social preferences. Such preferences are considered to be the main explanation for observed behavior in a wide range of experimental settings. In this work, we set out to understand the role of bargaining power in the stylized environment of a Generalized Ultimatum Game (GUG). We modify the payoff structure of the standard Ultimatum Game (UG) to investigate three situations: two in which the power balance is either against the proposer or against the responder, and a balanced situation. We find that other-regarding preferences, as measured by the amount of money donated by participants, do not change with the amount of power, but power changes the offers and acceptance rates systematically. Notably, unusually high acceptance rates for lower offers were observed. This finding suggests that social preferences may be invariant to the balance of power and confirms that the role of power on human behavior deserves more attention.

| S-EPMC4048244 | biostudies-literature

The Evolution of Generosity in the Ultimatum Game.

Project description:When humans fail to make optimal decisions in strategic games and economic gambles, researchers typically try to explain why that behaviour is biased. To this end, they search for mechanisms that cause human behaviour to deviate from what seems to be the rational optimum. But perhaps human behaviour is not biased; perhaps research assumptions about the optimality of strategies are incomplete. In the one-shot anonymous symmetric ultimatum game (UG), humans fail to play optimally as defined by the Nash equilibrium. However, the distinction between kin and non-kin-with kin detection being a key evolutionary adaption-is often neglected when deriving the "optimal" strategy. We computationally evolved strategies in the UG that were equipped with an evolvable probability to discern kin from non-kin. When an opponent was not kin, agents evolved strategies that were similar to those used by humans. We therefore conclude that the strategy humans play is not irrational. The deviation between behaviour and the Nash equilibrium may rather be attributable to key evolutionary adaptations, such as kin detection. Our findings further suggest that social preference models are likely to capture mechanisms that permit people to play optimally in an evolutionary context. Once this context is taken into account, human behaviour no longer appears irrational.

| S-EPMC5039727 | biostudies-literature

Individualism, Collectivism, and Allocation Behavior: Evidence from the Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game.

Project description:Studies have demonstrated the influence of the cultural values of individualism and collectivism on individuals' economic behavior (e.g., competition and trade). By using individualistic and collectivistic texts to prime participants' minds in a lab experiment, we investigated the impact of the cultural values of individualism and collectivism on allocation behavior in an ultimatum game (UG) and dictator game (DG). In the dictator game, we found that participants in the collectivism-priming condition reported a slightly higher mean offer than in the individualism-priming condition, and participants had an average higher acceptance rate of the proposers' offer in the collectivism-priming (vs. individualism-priming) condition in the ultimatum game. Our findings suggest that participants exhibit more altruistic allocation behavior and are more tolerant of unfair allocation behavior after being primed by the collectivistic (vs. individualistic) texts. In comparison with participants who did not undergo initiation, we also found that Chinese participants who had been influenced by collectivist values for a long time remained unaffected after the initiation of collectivism, but shifted their allocation behavior (i.e., showed decreased altruistic allocation behavior and reduced tolerance of unfair allocation behavior) when individualism was primed.

| S-EPMC9951955 | biostudies-literature

Fair and unfair punishers coexist in the Ultimatum Game.

Project description:In the Ultimatum Game, a proposer suggests how to split a sum of money with a responder. If the responder rejects the proposal, both players get nothing. Rejection of unfair offers is regarded as a form of punishment implemented by fair-minded individuals, who are willing to impose the cooperation norm at a personal cost. However, recent research using other experimental frameworks has observed non-negligible levels of antisocial punishment by competitive, spiteful individuals, which can eventually undermine cooperation. Using two large-scale experiments, this note explores the nature of Ultimatum Game punishers by analyzing their behavior in a Dictator Game. In both studies, the coexistence of two entirely different sub-populations is confirmed: prosocial punishers on the one hand, who behave fairly as dictators, and spiteful (antisocial) punishers on the other, who are totally unfair. The finding has important implications regarding the evolution of cooperation and the behavioral underpinnings of stable social systems.

| S-EPMC4129421 | biostudies-literature

Evolution of fairness in the not quite ultimatum game.

Project description:The Ultimatum Game (UG) is an economic game where two players (proposer and responder) decide how to split a certain amount of money. While traditional economic theories based on rational decision making predict that the proposer should make a minimal offer and the responder should accept it, human subjects tend to behave more fairly in UG. Previous studies suggested that extra information such as reputation, empathy, or spatial structure is needed for fairness to evolve in UG. Here we show that fairness can evolve without additional information if players make decisions probabilistically and may continue interactions when the offer is rejected, which we call the Not Quite Ultimatum Game (NQUG). Evolutionary simulations of NQUG showed that the probabilistic decision making contributes to the increase of proposers' offer amounts to avoid rejection, while the repetition of the game works to responders' advantage because they can wait until a good offer comes. These simple extensions greatly promote evolution of fairness in both proposers' offers and responders' acceptance thresholds.

| S-EPMC4037714 | biostudies-literature

Psilocybin and MDMA reduce costly punishment in the Ultimatum Game.

Project description:Disruptions in social decision-making are becoming evident in many psychiatric conditions. These are studied using paradigms investigating the psychological mechanisms underlying interpersonal interactions, such as the Ultimatum Game (UG). Rejection behaviour in the UG represents altruistic punishment - the costly punishment of norm violators - but the mechanisms underlying it require clarification. To investigate the psychopharmacology of UG behaviour, we carried out two studies with healthy participants, employing serotonergic agonists: psilocybin (open-label, within-participant design, N?=?19) and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover design, N?=?20). We found that both MDMA and psilocybin reduced rejection of unfair offers (odds ratio: 0.57 and 0.42, respectively). The reduction in rejection rate following MDMA was associated with increased prosociality (R2?=?0.26, p?=?0.025). In the MDMA study, we investigated third-party decision-making and proposer behaviour. MDMA did not reduce rejection in the third-party condition, but produced an increase in the amount offered to others (Cohen's d?=?0.82). We argue that these compounds altered participants' conceptualisation of 'social reward', placing more emphasis on the direct relationship with interacting partners. With these compounds showing efficacy in drug-assisted psychotherapy, these studies are an important step in the further characterisation of their psychological effects.

| S-EPMC5974271 | biostudies-literature

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