Offer Konstantin, Mischkowski Dorothee, Rahwan Zoe, Engel Christoph
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC), Lentzeallee 94, 14195, Berlin, Germany.
Max Planck School of Cognition, Stephanstrasse 1a, Leipzig, Germany.
Commun Psychol. 2024 May 24;2(1):48. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00093-6.
Why do people punish experienced unfairness if it induces costs for both the punisher and punished person(s) without any direct material benefits for the punisher? Economic theories of fairness propose that punishers experience disutility from disadvantageous inequality and punish in order to establish equality in outcomes. We tested these theories in a modified Ultimatum Game (N = 1370) by examining whether people avoid the urge to reject unfair offers, and thereby punish the proposer, by deliberately blinding themselves to unfairness. We found that 53% of participants deliberately ignored whether they had received an unfair offer. Among these participants, only 6% of offers were rejected. As expected, participants who actively sought information rejected significantly more unfair offers (39%). Averaging these rejection rates to 21%, no significant difference to the rejection rate by participants who were directly informed about unfairness was found, contrary to our hypothesis. We interpret these findings as evidence for sorting behavior: People who punish experienced unfairness seek information about it, while those who do not punish deliberately ignore it.
如果惩罚过往的不公平行为会给惩罚者和被惩罚者双方都带来成本，且惩罚者没有任何直接的物质利益，那人们为什么还要这么做呢？公平的经济理论提出，惩罚者会因不利的不平等而体验到负效用，并进行惩罚以建立结果的平等。我们在一个修改后的最后通牒博弈（N = 1370）中检验了这些理论，方法是考察人们是否通过故意对不公平视而不见来避免拒绝不公平提议的冲动，从而惩罚提议者。我们发现，53%的参与者故意忽略自己是否收到了不公平提议。在这些参与者中，只有6%的提议被拒绝。正如预期的那样，积极寻求信息的参与者拒绝的不公平提议要多得多（39%）。将这些拒绝率平均到21%，与直接被告知不公平的参与者的拒绝率相比，没有发现显著差异，这与我们的假设相反。我们将这些发现解释为分类行为的证据：惩罚过往不公平行为的人会寻求相关信息，而不进行惩罚的人则会故意忽略它。
