Gut feelings and the reaction to perceived inequity: The interplay between bodily responses, regulation, and perception shapes the rejection of unfair offers on the ultimatum game

Dunn, Barnaby D.; Evans, Davy; Makarova, Dasha; White, Joshua T.; Clark, Luke

doi:10.3758/s13415-012-0092-z

Cited by 70 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Indeed, it was shown that anger mediated the relationship between the magnitude of offers and acceptance rates such that more anger resulted in decreased acceptance rates (Srivastava et al, 2009). Congruently, psycho-physiological findings showed that unfair UG-offers were associated with increased sympathetic arousal as measured by skin conductance response (SCR; van't Wout et al, 2006) and increased emotional orienting response as measured by heart-rate (HR) deceleration (Osumi and Ohira, 2009; though mixed results were shown by Dunn et al, 2012). An example for individual differences in the emotional response to UG-offers was recently shown in a study in which greater resting HR-variability, a marker of trait emotion regulation capability which was measured before playing the UG, predicted subsequent increased acceptance rates (Dunn et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Congruently, psycho-physiological findings showed that unfair UG-offers were associated with increased sympathetic arousal as measured by skin conductance response (SCR; van't Wout et al, 2006) and increased emotional orienting response as measured by heart-rate (HR) deceleration (Osumi and Ohira, 2009; though mixed results were shown by Dunn et al, 2012). An example for individual differences in the emotional response to UG-offers was recently shown in a study in which greater resting HR-variability, a marker of trait emotion regulation capability which was measured before playing the UG, predicted subsequent increased acceptance rates (Dunn et al, 2012). Further support for the role of emotion regulation in one's response to UG-offers stems from findings such that depleting cognitive control resources resulted in decreased acceptance rates (Halali et al, 2014), while explicitly instructing to regulate emotions resulted in increased acceptance rates (van't Wout et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

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Neural substrates underlying the tendency to accept anger-infused ultimatum offers during dynamic social interactions

et al. 2015

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In managing our way through interpersonal conflict, anger might be crucial in determining whether the dispute escalates to aggressive behaviors or resolves cooperatively. The Ultimatum Game (UG) is a social decision-making paradigm that provides a framework for studying interpersonal conflict over division of monetary resources. Unfair monetary UG-offers elicit anger and while accepting them engages regulatory processes, rejecting them is regarded as an aggressive retribution. Ventro-medial prefrontal-cortex (vmPFC) activity has been shown to relate to idiosyncratic tendencies in accepting unfair offers possibly through its role in emotion regulation. Nevertheless, standard UG paradigms lack fundamental aspects of real-life social interactions in which one reacts to other people in a response contingent fashion. To uncover the neural substrates underlying the tendency to accept anger-infused ultimatum offers during dynamic social interactions, we incorporated on-line verbal negotiations with an obnoxious partner in a repeated-UG during fMRI scanning. We hypothesized that vmPFC activity will differentiate between individuals with high or low monetary gains accumulated throughout the game and reflect a divergence in the associated emotional experience. We found that as individuals gained more money, they reported less anger but also more positive feelings and had slower sympathetic response. In addition, high-gain individuals had increased vmPFC activity, but also decreased brainstem activity, which possibly reflected the locus coeruleus. During the more angering unfair offers, these individuals had increased dorsal-posterior Insula (dpI) activity which functionally coupled to the medial-thalamus (mT). Finally, both vmPFC activity and dpI-mT connectivity contributed to increased gain, possibly by modulating the ongoing subjective emotional experience. These ecologically valid findings point towards a neural mechanism that might nurture pro-social interactions by modulating an individual's dynamic emotional experience.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Neural substrates underlying the tendency to accept anger-infused ultimatum offers during dynamic social interactions

et al. 2015

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“…outcomes (Ben-Shakhar et al, 2007;Dunn et al, 2012;Joffily et al, 2014;Sanfey et al, 2003;van't Wout et al, 2006). In our setting this possibly indicates that the players view mutual losses as the most alerting events in the course of the game, and that the ANS responses to other events (mutual gains and one-sided losses and gains) remain undetected in our study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Emotions in a repeated Cournot duopoly game: A psychophysiological experiment.

Leppänen¹,

Hämäläinen²

2017

Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics

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The reason why cooperation occurs in repeated games has remained a puzzle. Earlier literature has maintained that reciprocal behavior that gives rise to cooperation can be entirely self-regarding. However, experimental evidence shows that reciprocal behavior is otherregarding in many one-shot games. This other-regarding behavior is believed to have an emotional foundation. We hypothesized that emotions play a role in reciprocal behavior in repeated games as well. We tested this hypothesis by measuring the psychophysiological correlates of emotions from pairs of subjects as they played a repeated Cournot duopoly game.The players, who were in different rooms and remained anonymous to each other, made adjustment decisions to their production quantities that determined their payoffs in each round.Autonomic nervous system arousal was activated when the payoffs of both players decreased in a round, whereas positive affect was expressed when the payoffs of both players increased in a round. The disgust expression was related to a player's own one-sided increase in the payoff.Anger was expressed occasionally but less frequently when the outcome was the player's ideal outcome. An upwards adjustment of the production quantity was observed when the other player did not cooperate. This had the effect of decreasing the payoffs of both players and this was also related to an increase in the level of arousal. Our results provide evidence on how emotions are present in reciprocal behavior in a repeated social dilemma game. The results challenge recent behavioral research that advocates self-regarded motivations of cooperation in repeated games. What is the role of emotions in cooperation in repeated games? Mounting experimental evidence from one-shot games shows that cooperative behavior is related to emotions (Camerer and Fehr, 2004;Camerer et al., 2005;Fessler and Haley, 2003;Haidt, 2007;Loewenstein et al., 2008;Phelps, 2009;Sanfey, 2007) despite of the fact that in one-shot games the players interact anonymously and expect to never meet again in the same situation. Research in behavioral economics has explained cooperation in one-shot games by the players' preferences for equity and fairness and the reciprocal punishment and reward strategies that arise from these preferences (Boyd et al., 2010;Fehr and Fischbacher, 2002;Sobel, 2005). The concepts of emotions and other-regarding preferences are two sides of the same coin. For example, unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game elicit the negative emotions of anger (Pillutla and Murnighan, 1996), sadness (Harlé and Sanfey, 2007), and disgust (Chapman et al., 2009).The findings of emotional activity in cooperation in one-shot games cannot be generalized to repeated games. This is because of the Folk Theorem arguments that are most often used to explain behavior in repeated interaction. According to the Folk Theorem, reciprocal punishments and rewards that typically demonstrate other-regarding behavior in one-shot games can be part of an adaptive and rational response strategy...

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“…This seemingly irrational choice is thought to be driven by negative emotions, such as anger or frustration, in response to unfair treatment. In this game, individuals with a lower HRV tended to reject unfair offers compared with individuals with a higher HRV (Dunn et al, 2012;Harlé et al, 2010), which suggests that inhibitory control processes promote the rational choice. The resting HRV was also measured in conjunction with another decision-making task, a gambling task in which the participants were asked to decide between a "sure" option and a "gambling" option (Sütterlin, Herbert, Schmitt, Kübler, & Vögele, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…For instance, Harlé, Allen, and Sanfey (2010) and Dunn, Evans, Makarova, White, and Clark (2012) investigated the relation between the resting HRV and the emotional influence on decision making using the ultimatum game, which has two players: a proposer and a responder (Dunn, Evans, Makarova, White, & Clark, 2012;Harlé et al, 2010). The proposer makes an offer for how to divide a sum of money, and if the responder accepts the offer, then the proposal is implemented.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in heart rate variability are associated with the avoidance of negative emotional events

Katahira

Fujimura

Matsuda

et al. 2014

Biological Psychology

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Although the emotional outcome of a choice generally affects subsequent decisions, humans can inhibit the influence of emotion. Heart rate variability (HRV) has emerged as an objective measure of individual differences in the capacity for inhibitory control. In the present study, we investigated how individual differences in HRV at rest are associated with the emotional effects of the outcome of a choice on subsequent decision making using a decision-making task in which emotional pictures appeared as decision outcomes. We used a reinforcement learning model to characterize the observed behaviors according to several parameters, namely, the learning rate and the motivational value of positive and negative pictures. Consequently, we found that individuals with a lower resting HRV exhibited a greater negative motivational value in response to negative pictures, suggesting that these individuals tend to avoid negative pictures compared with individuals with a higher resting HRV.

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Gut feelings and the reaction to perceived inequity: The interplay between bodily responses, regulation, and perception shapes the rejection of unfair offers on the ultimatum game

Cited by 70 publications

References 50 publications

Neural substrates underlying the tendency to accept anger-infused ultimatum offers during dynamic social interactions

Neural substrates underlying the tendency to accept anger-infused ultimatum offers during dynamic social interactions

Emotions in a repeated Cournot duopoly game: A psychophysiological experiment.

Individual differences in heart rate variability are associated with the avoidance of negative emotional events

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