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The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: August 25, 2023
656
Deliberately ignoring inequality to avoid rejecting unfair offers.
Konstantin Offer1,2,3, Dorothee Mischkowski4,5, Zoe Rahwan6
1Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC), Lentzeallee 94, 14195, Berlin, Germany. offer@mpib-berlin.mpg.de.
Communications Psychology
|September 6, 2024
Summary
People avoid punishing unfairness by deliberately ignoring it. Those who seek information about unfairness are more likely to punish, suggesting a sorting behavior in fairness enforcement.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral Economics
- Social Psychology
- Decision-Making
Background:
- Economic theories propose punishment of unfairness aims to establish outcome equality.
- Punishing unfairness incurs costs without direct material benefit, posing a theoretical puzzle.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether individuals deliberately avoid information about unfairness to circumvent punishment.
- To test the hypothesis that active information seeking correlates with higher rejection rates of unfair offers.
Main Methods:
- A modified Ultimatum Game experiment involving 1370 participants.
- Assessing participants' information-seeking behavior regarding offer fairness.
- Comparing rejection rates between participants who sought information, ignored it, or were directly informed.
Main Results:
- 53% of participants deliberately ignored information about offer fairness.
- Participants who ignored fairness information rejected only 6% of unfair offers.
- Participants who actively sought fairness information rejected 39% of unfair offers.
Conclusions:
- Findings suggest a sorting behavior where individuals predisposed to punish seek information, while those disinclined to punish avoid it.
- Deliberate ignorance serves as a mechanism to avoid the costly act of punishing experienced unfairness.
- The study provides empirical evidence on the interplay between information avoidance and fairness-related punishment decisions.
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