| Social norms include voluntary and sanction-induced norm compliance.All known human societies have maintained social order by enforcing compliance with social norms and punishment incentives play an important role in it.But little attention has been paid to the underlying reason that why people defect against social norms and how prosocial behavior can be promoted when punishment fails.Fairness and equality aversion is the motivation of prosocial behaviors,and the consistency of equality aversion in advantageous and disadvantageous has not known.If not,what the fair demarcation point is.Our study discussed the problems above by three experiments,respectively.Even though the experimental paradigms of three experiments were not same,they are all the modified version of Ultimatum Game.In Experiment 1,by controlling the feedback after subjects rejecting the self-benefitting options(compliance with social norms)by the computer as the proposer,we want to investigate the influence of feedback(risk or non-risk)to continue to comply with social norms.In Experiment 2,using the risk condition in experiment 1,we compensate the earned resource loss following compliance with social norms by money or moral rewards to investigate whether encourage would improve prosocial tendency.In experiment 3,participants also played the UG as responders to accept or reject unfair offers.We designed two types of unfair offers: highly unfair offers(90/80 vs.20/10)and moderately unfair offers(70/60 vs.40/30),by which we want to investigate whether the advantageous equality aversion and disadvantageous equality aversion is consistency in both highly unfair offers and moderately unfair offers.If not,what the demarcation point is in both advantageous and disadvantageous domains.The results as following:(1)Experiment compared the choice under risk(unfair)feedback to that of non-risk(fair)feedback following compliance with social norms and the results showed that the frequency of accepting the self-benefitting division schemes in the risk condition was higher than that of the non-risk condition,demonstrating that compliance to social norms is based upon earned resources reservation(fair feedback)rather than the effectiveness of sanction.If the feedback is fair(non-risk),then individuals continue to comply with social norms;otherwise,they would choose to maintain their fundamental economic benefit.(2)The results of Experimental 2 revealed that both rewards would improve the social norms compliance again,even moral praise effectively compensate earned resource loss after rejecting the extremely self-benefit choices,which extended previous studies on humancooperative behavior by emphasizing the importance of internal,fair-based balance on material or moral need in social norms compliance.(3)Behavioral results of Experiment 3 showed that the acceptance rate of moderately unfair offers(65.5%)was significantly higher than that of highly unfair offers(8.3%),which implied that participants had fairness preference and was accordance with Experiment 1 and 2.Pair-sampled T test showed that the demarcation point in advantageous and disadvantageous domains was 60% and 45%,respectively.Event-related brain potentials recorded from the participants showed that the wave amplitude of MFN for moderately unfair offers in the disadvantageous domain(40/30)was lager than that in the advantageous domain(70/60)and the the wave amplitude of P300 for moderately unfair offers in the advantageous domain(70/60)was lager than that in the disadvantageous domain(40/30)whereas they did not show differential responses for highly unfair offers(90/80 vs.20/10),which suggested the fairness magnitude influences the consistency of inequality aversion,which was inline with behavioral result. |
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