Department of Psychology, College of Education, Hangzhou Normal University Hangzhou, China ; Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Research in Assessment of Cognitive Impairments, Hangzhou Normal University Hangzhou, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2015 Mar 5;9:123. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00123. eCollection 2015.
Empirical evidence indicates that people are inequity averse. However, it is unclear whether and how suffering unfairness impacts subsequent behavior. We investigated the consequences of unfair treatment in subsequent interactions with new interaction partners and the associated neural mechanisms. Participants were experimentally manipulated to experience fair or unfair treatment in the ultimatum game (UG), and subsequently, they were given the opportunity to retaliate in the dictator game (DG) in their interactions with players who had not played a role in the previous fair or unfair treatment. The results showed that participants dictated less money to unrelated partners after frequently receiving unfair offers in the previous UG (vs. frequently receiving fair offers in the previous UG), but only when they were first exposed to unfair UG/DG. Stronger activation in the right dorsal anterior insula was found during receiving unfair offers and during the subsequent offer-considering phase. The regional homogeneity (ReHo), a measure of the local synchronization of neighboring voxels in resting-state brain activity, in the left ventral anterior insula and left superior temporal pole was positively correlated with the behavior change. These findings suggest that unfair treatment may encourage a spread of unfairness, and that the anterior insula may be not only engaged in signaling social norm violations, but also recruited in guiding subsequent adaptive behaviors.
经验证据表明，人们厌恶不公平。然而，目前尚不清楚不公平待遇是否以及如何影响后续行为。我们研究了在与新的交互伙伴的后续交互中不公平待遇的后果，以及相关的神经机制。参与者在最后通牒博弈（UG）中经历了公平或不公平的待遇，然后在与在之前的公平或不公平待遇中没有扮演角色的玩家进行的独裁者博弈（DG）中，他们有机会进行报复。结果表明，参与者在之前的 UG 中经常收到不公平的报价（与之前的 UG 中经常收到公平的报价相比）后，向不相关的伙伴分配的钱较少，但前提是他们第一次接触到不公平的 UG/DG。在收到不公平的报价时，以及在随后的报价考虑阶段，右侧背侧前岛叶的激活强度更强。静息状态大脑活动中相邻体素局部同步性的度量——左侧腹侧前岛叶和左侧颞上极的局部一致性（ReHo）与行为变化呈正相关。这些发现表明，不公平待遇可能会鼓励不公平待遇的扩散，而前岛叶不仅参与信号社会规范的违反，还被招募来指导后续的适应性行为。
