Influence Of Attractiveness On Individual's Decision-making And Fairness In The Ultimatum Game

Face is one of the most important information source in our social activities. According to the studies on stereotype of facial attractiveness, attractive individuals, as opposed to unattractive ones, are typically thought to have many more socially desirable and positive personality traits. Thus facial attractiveness do have some influence on people's thought and behavior. In the daily life, we have to make a decision frequently. Meanwhile many factors will affect our decision-making including facial attractiveness. Based on previous research, experiment one used ERPs to explore if there exist some specific components which reflect how attractiveness influence invidual's decision-making in ultimatum game. When investigate this phenomenon, previous studies employed only adults. In experiment two, through a developmental view, we firstly focus on children in order to exlpore how attractiveness influence invidual's decision-making when the sense of fairness is not well formed.The behavior results of experiment one showed that in unfair conditions, the acceptance rate significantly decreased from attractiveness to unattractiveness. The ERP results indicated that when facing unfair offers and subjects chose to accept, the N2 and LPC amplitudes elicited by facing unattractive proposers were more negative than that by attractive proposers. Intriguingly, the N2 amplitude reversed (most negative when facing attractive proposer) when they rejected unfair offers. These results suggested that in an economic decision-making task, when people cooperate with an unattractive individual, in order to make a rational decision (accept), it may take more physiological and psychological resources to inhibit the thoughts of rejection rooted in unattractiveness stereotype. while it may take more physiological and psychological resources to inhibit the thoughts of cooperation and favor rooted in attractiveness stereotype when they rejected an attractive person. The results of experiment two indicated that when acted as proposer, subjects with strong sense of fairness, allocated more than those with weak sense of fairness. And subjects allocated more to attractive responsers than unattractive ones. When subjects turned to be responsers and unfair allocation was made, the acceptance rate of subjects with strong sense of fairness was higher than those with weak sense of fairness, moreover, the acceptance rate to attractive proposer was higher than unattractive ones in both group. According to these two experiments, we can draw a conclusion that whether high level sense of fairness acquired or not, attractiveness would influence individual's decision-making in the ultimatum game. Furthermore, behavior of 5-6 aged children in a social ecnomic decision-making would be affected both by their development of fairness and facial attractiveness.