Victim Sensitivity and Proposal Size Modulate the Ingroup Favoritism During Fairness Norm Enforcement

Abstract

People show a strong aversion to inequality and are willing to sacrifice their own interests to punish violations of fairness norms. Empirical research has found that group membership could influence the fairness judgment and norm enforcement of the individuals but has shown inconsistent findings and has not focused much on the potential moderators. Here, the two studies aimed to investigate whether victim sensitivity and proposal size moderate the impact of group membership on reactions to unfair proposals. In both studies, the participants with different victim sensitivity (low vs. high group) played the hypothetical (Study 1) and incentivized (Study 2) ultimatum game under the intragroup and intergroup condition and indicated their responses to the different proposals. Results showed that, regardless of the victim sensitivity, ingroup member is often given preferential and positive treatment. Low victim sensitive persons are more likely to accept unfair offers from the ingroup than the outgroup, while this effect was attenuated for those with high victim sensitivity, especially for highly ambiguous unfair offers (offer 6:4 in Study 1 and 8:2 in Study 2). Moreover, the ingroup favoritism score for ambiguous unfair offers was smaller for high compared with the victim sensitivity group. Taken together, the victim sensitivity, and proposal size could moderate the ingroup favoritism on responses to unfairness.

Effects of Ingroup Identification on Ingroup Favouritism during Fairness Norm Enforcement

“…The minimum sample size needed to detect a medium effect (f 2 = 0.20) was N = 44 (22 participants per group) with 0.95 power and 0.05 Type I error rate. Second, a similar three-way interaction showed a medium effect size (partial η 2 = 0.06) in our recent work [ 4 ] when two groups each contain 25 participants. Finally, previous behaviour research on fairness norm enforcement had a similar sample size per condition [ 46 , 47 ].…”

“…We modified an intergroup version of the ultimatum game that has been used in previous studies [ 4 , 17 ]. In this experiment, all participants played the role of responders.…”

“…Finally, the participants received additional rewards ranging from 1.8 CNY to 2.3 CNY ( M ± SD : 2.01 ± 0.17). This study’s dependent variables are the acceptance rates and response time for each proposal in two interactions and the ingroup favouritism score , which reflects the difference in the acceptance rates between the intragroup and intergroup contexts [ 4 ].…”

“…Respecting and following social norms promote interpersonal cooperation, while ignoring and violating social norms can lead to interpersonal conflict [ 3 ]. The resource allocation situation is one of the important areas affected by social norms, and the imbalance of resource allocation is also one of the important reasons for interpersonal conflicts [ 4 , 5 ]. Fair norm enforcement refers to the willingness and behaviour of people to voluntarily pay benefits to punish violations of fairness norms [ 6 ].…”

“…In addition, evidence from two meta-analyses also pointed to a small to medium effect size, indicating that children, adolescents and adults preferentially cooperate with ingroup members [ 33 , 34 ]. Moreover, recent studies demonstrated that ingroup bias during fairness norm enforcement was influenced by situational and personality factors [ 4 , 20 ]. Therefore, understanding the intersection and modulator of group affiliation and fairness norm enforcement can provide insight into when , why and which individuals are involved in punishment behaviours.…”