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The accumulation of findings that most responders in the ultimatum game reject unfair offers provides evidence that humans are driven by social preferences such as preferences for fairness and prosociality. On the other hand, if and how the proposer’s behavior is affected by social preferences remains unelucidated. We addressed this question for the first time by manipulating the knowledge that the proposer had about the responder’s belief concerning the intentionality of the proposer. In a new game called the “ultimatum game with ambiguous intentions of the proposer (UGAMB),” we made the intentionality of the proposer ambiguous to the recipient. We expected and found that the proposer would make more unfair offers in this new game than in the standard ultimatum game. This expectation can be derived from either the preference-based model or the strategy model of the proposer’s giving decision. The additional finding that more unfair giving in the UGAMB was not mediated by the proposer’s expectation that the recipient would be more willing to accept unfair offers provided support for the preference-based model. Using a psychological measure of cognitive control, the preference-based model received additional support through a conceptual replication of the previous finding that cognitive control of intuitive drive for prosociality in the dictator game, rather than mind reading in the ultimatum game, is responsible for the difference in giving between the two games.

In three experiments, we provide evidence that resource divisibility and expectations of sharing influence the degree to which envy arises in response to another's superior resources. We manipulated the resource divisibility (e.g., 2 coins worth approximately $5.50 each vs. a single note worth approximately $11) and expectations of sharing were measured (Experiments 1 and 2) and manipulated (Experiment 3). Findings in these three experiments supported our hypothesis that envy would be most strongly experienced in response to others who had highly divisible resources that participants did not believe would be shared. These findings offer novel insights into the adaptive function of envy, which may promote sharing of divisible resources.

Envy is an unpleasant emotion caused by comparison with a person who possesses something we desire. We conducted two studies to test our prediction that less envy would be felt when the person could attain what others had. In Study 1, participants read scenarios in which their friend could achieve a goal which they could not, and rated their emotions toward the friend. We manipulated the attainability according to whether the goal could be achieved by effort. In Study 2, participants competed with a confederate, and were informed that their performance was worse than that of the confederate. Afterwards the attainability was manipulated by either informing the participants that the possibility of improving their ability was very low or high. Then participants rated their emotions toward the confederate, and we also checked whether the participants had helped the confederate. As predicted, our findings demonstrated that those in the high attainability condition felt envy less than those in the low attainability condition, but showed no significant differences in helping behavior.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the popularity of online shopping, and companies are looking for ways to provide consumers with experiences that online shopping cannot provide, such as touching products and imagining them in use. In this context, the importance of haptic imagery of products showcased online is increasing. This study replicated and extended Peck et al. 's (2013) finding that physical control and psychological ownership mediate the influence of haptic imagery on purchase intention. This study showed that imagining touching a product increased purchase intention through the mediation of physical control and psychological ownership compared with not imagining, conceptually replicating Peck et al. 's (2013) study. This study also examined the moderating effect of product involvement and showed that there was no moderator role of product involvement. The findings would have a practical application in marketing, such as encouraging consumers to imagine touching the product.

This study examined the validity of the Japanese version of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS) with Japanese undergraduate student and non-student samples. Previous studies have identified two types of envy, benign and malicious, that motivate different types of behavior. However, the validity of the BeMaS, developed to measure two types of dispositional envy, has not been adequately confirmed in East Asian countries. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the two-factor structure of BeMaS is identical across various samples. Thus, in this study, we specified the Japanese words describing envy, namely, urayamashii or netamashii, suitable for the Japanese BeMaS. Additionally, we tested the validity of the scale’s two-factor model across undergraduate students and non-student samples. The questionnaire survey results showed that the validity of BeMaS’s two-factor structural model was confirmed in both samples and the goodness of fit was better for urayamashii than for netamashii. Moreover, measurement invariance across the two samples was established in configural and metric models.