The Influence Of Fairness-related Prior Experience On The Third-party Punishment

The existence and development of human society cannot exist without the establishment and enfoecement of social norms.Fairness is a basic norm in human society.When the fairness norm was violated,the third parties,who are unrelated to unfair events,were willing to sacrifice their own interests to punish norm violators.The punishment behaviors implemented by third parties were considered to be based on fairness consideration,which played a key role in enforcing fairness norm and thus were also called fairness norm enforcement behaviors.The Third-Party Punishment Game were employed to explore the third-party punishment in laboratory.Based on the Dictator Game,the Third-Party Punishment Game add a third party who has no personal interests in the Dictator Game and was unrelated to the players in the Dictator Game.In Dictator Game,there are two players,player A(proposer)has the right to propose how to splite the money between the two players,player B(recipient)can only passively accept the offer proposed by player A and can not reject it.After observing performance of player A and player B in the Dictator Game,the third party needs to decide whether to spend part of their endowment to punish proposer,and each token assigned to punishment decreases the income of the proposers by three tokens.Also,the third party can choose not to punish.It was found that third parties punished norm violators more strongly with an increase in norm violations.Humans are naturally social animals.For adapting the surroundings and understanding the social norms of group they belonged to,most individuals,as members of society,would observe the behaviors of other members and adjust their own behaviors accordingly the behaviors of group members.However,how third-party punishments influenced by prior experiences of fairness-related distributions in social environments still remains unclear.To explore this issue,the present study employed classical third-party punishment game and set up three different contexts of prior experiences of fairness-related distributions.Specifically,in the first context,participants acted as second parties involve in prior experiences of generous or selfish distributions(Study 1),in the second context,participants acted as third parties involve in prior experiences of generous or selfish distributions(Study 2),and in the third context,participants acted as bystanders who merely observed the interactions of payers in DG during the prior experiences of generous or selfish distributions(Study 3).The present study systematically explored how prior experiences of fairness-related distribution influenced the third-party punishment.Meanwhile,this study also used electroencephalography(EEG)techniques to examine the neural mechanisms underlying the third-party punishment influenced by prior experiences.Totally,three studies(six experiments)were designed and each study explored the issues both at the behavioral and neural levels,respectively.The behavioral results showed that the punishment rates and transfer amounts for unfair offers were significantly increased and fairness ratings were significantly decreased after experiencing generous distributions,the punishment rates and transfer amounts for unfair offers were significantly decreased and fairness ratings were significantly increased after experiencing selfish distributions.The changes in punishment rates and transfer amounts were significantly predicted by changes in fairness ratings.The behavioral results also showed that the difference of the effect of prior experience on punishment rates and trandfer amounts between three contexts was not significant.These results indicated that individuals would adjust thier punishment behaviors based on prior experiences of generous or selfish distributions,and this effect was relatively stable and independent of the specific contexts of prior experience.Furthermore,the EEG results showed that in all three contexts of prior experiences,fair offers elicited higher P300 amplitudes than unfair offers and individuals with low empathic traits showed a larger MFN in unfair trials.More importantly,when processing the offers,the theta recorded in prefrontal electrodes was influenced by prior experiences.Specifically,the theta was lower in unfair trials after the prior experience of generous distributions.However,the theta was higher in unfair trials after the prior experience of selfish distributions.Further analysese across three studies found that the effect of prior experience on the theta did not differ significantly between three EEG experiments.The present study systematically explored how the prior experiences influenced third-party punishment both on behavioral and neural levels,the results showed that people could adjust their third-party punishment behaviors flexibly according to prior experiences of fairness-related distributions.These findings helped us to have a better understanding of the fairness norms enforcement behavior in complex social environments.